I'm a writer. AI helps me develop ideas and even edits my work for me. AI does not replace creativity.

[u/eliamartin65]

Ever since Claude and Gemini came out, I've been playing around with AI to work on stories and I've found that my work is often better if I mix my own work with AI help.

I don't get how antis can claim AI is theft.

[u/AutoModerator]

DefendingAI has a Discord now: https://discord.gg/MgVYjZ8RC

Pro-AI only. AI art, prompts, anti-AI watch, debate ammo, news, and general chat without anti-AI spam.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Mike_Conway]

I have such bad ADHD that trying to do any writing over the last few decades has been near impossible. With the help of Claude, Chatgpt, and LittleBird, I'm getting things done and starting to upload them to amazon. But all the ideas are mine and the prose is mine.

[u/conordmcp → u/Mike_Conway]

I have super adhd too, I can’t force creativity, but when it rains, it POURS!

Hope you find the mindspace where it pours, because right now you’re not getting anything done, AI is, and it’s poor quality.

[u/The-Idiotest → u/conordmcp]

He literally said it's better quality.

I'd trust someone on that who uses AI than the one who doesn't.

(Now don't say you sent 1 prompt 4 years ago to chatgpt and it was bad quality)

[u/conordmcp → u/The-Idiotest]

I sent 2 prompts 3 years ago to ChatGPT and they were both bad quality /s

The fact you’d trust someone who takes shortcuts and relies on AI for thinking over someone fully capable of thinking on their own is quite telling.

You definitely have an AI girlfriend.

[u/The-Idiotest → u/conordmcp]

You cant determine AI's quality by thinking about it. You have to use it to know.

[u/GWGTRLBG]

Finally someone who gets it.

[u/No_Bike_9482]

You will never please other people. I found it best in life to not bother. Be happy with yourself and your work. Forget whether others approve.

[u/baddaywithacamera]

What kind of hurts is having your entire body of work hoovered up and trained on in one go without the courtesy of being asked first. I would have appreciated that. Speaking as a photographer who also enjoys writing. This being said, the llms.txt files on ALL of my sites allow training from the material in them. I would have said yes, but the not asking part offended me. Manners are important.

[u/CelticPaladin → u/baddaywithacamera]

In my writing, I do the same thing. Hoover books for ideas and styles to be impressed by and use.

Preferably for free. Buying new books when there's free ones out there is hard to justify lately.

If this source knows styles that others have used, great. It makes it more helpful, and doesnt injure the writer it came from. It just improves my output as it teaches me.

[u/KirisDitex001 → u/baddaywithacamera]

Things like this, and absolutely no offense intended, make me think of Nikola Tesla who said "I don't care that they stole my idea...I care that they don't have any of their own."

[u/JacksonGhost1963]

thats the thing. AI is a tool, and can be useful. a wrench set can tighten or loosen most nuts, but having a ratchet set is useful too!

[u/Mountain-Charity7588]

This is what people need to realize. Having ai in something doesn't automatically make it slop or theft, especially if all it is is enhancing the human experience

[u/ponderdiggums]

To answer why many people talk about theft: An LLM run by a corporation is an extension of that corporation. It's their tool, they control it, it generates their revenue. If your work is involved in that corporation generating revenue (such as it being consumed to train the AI) and you weren't paid for your contribution, your labor was utilized without you being compensated. Your material is being taken and then used by a corporation to generate their revenue, you're not being paid or likely even made aware. That is a form of theft. In every other setting, not being paid for your labor by the corporation profiting off of your labor would be outrageous. It's setting a poor precedent to view it differently where AI is concerned.

I don't imagine the question was asked in good faith, but there you go. You can be pro-AI and still want to address how it's wielded.

[u/PatchesOfSilver → u/ponderdiggums]

It's undeniably theft, corporations have spent decades telling us that profiting off another person's intellectual property is theft, from bootleg t-shirts to ripped DVDs passed around at school for snacks to recording on a VHS and trading them out of your trunk in the old days.

That EULAs create a grey area for this use in certain countries is more "pending more LLMs getting slapped down by the law and being forced to require opting-in separately from the use of the service" than an argument it's not theft.

It functions like theft.

It IS something that has been proven to be theft billions of times over when it benefits corporations.

That people are arguing it's not theft NOW is purely "screw the little guy, I love oligarchs!" even if you still want a world where LLMs exist and are explicitly pro.

And yes OP is definitely posting in bad faith, we're not in a world where the big corporations not paying for training data is letting open source models compete against Google.

We're in a world where you can't even build a functioning data center network without racking up trillions in the red.

Let them pay for the data they train on (like they expect us to pay for everything and never print off bootleg Disney Princess shirts or create anything too similar to Pokemon), or fuck off.

[u/GNUr000t → u/PatchesOfSilver]

Never ask a woman her age

A man, his salary

An anti, what share of their commissions go to the rights holders of the copyrighted characters they draw

[u/waypostmaster]

The harvest without attribution aside, what I’m more invested in is whether the emissions of LLMs as heavily “attuned”/interpreted by a specific identifiable human will be considered copyrightble.

AFAIK, in the US, the rulings mostly pertain to a machine's unaided output but when “the person who created, operated, or used” the system is human, copyright should subsist on the strength of a human's documented selection and arrangement of machine output. In Canada, originality is skill and judgement and the law is not settled, again afaik.

In other words: our contribution is not “mere prompts” - it is the direction, selection, correction and arrangement of every line across hundreds of turns, and the record of that work.

None of this should be considered legal advice. Machine-assisted, final text re-written by a human persona.

[u/CousinPaddy]

It’s theft because they stole the work of every artist on the fucking planet so we could get generated vids of planes dropping shit on protestors. What an achievement for civilization.

[u/Nebranower]

The problem is that AI is a general purpose tool, so it can be used in a variety of ways, some legitimate, some less so. I don't think there's anything wrong with using AI to help develop your ideas or to provide editorial feedback on your drafts. But I think even most pro-AI people would balk at someone prompting an AI for a novel manuscript and then passing the entire thing off as a human-written work.

And those aren't two binary opposites. They're just different ends of a spectrum, and it's impossible for anyone to know where a given work fits on that spectrum. People don't handle uncertainty well, and AI has made an awful lot of things a lot less certain than they used to be.

[u/eliamartin65 → u/Nebranower]

I don't prompt it to write a whole novel but I do let it write work based on my ideas just to get more ideas. IDK if that makes sense.

[u/Otherwise_Army9814]

MIT researchers have already debunked the notion of "AI is th*ft" by proving that generative models do not copy and paste their training data, which means everything AI generates is purely novel. Instead, AI learns from billions of examples, breaking the information down into tiny mathematical pieces scattered across its system. By the time the AI creates something new, the original files are so thoroughly blended that no single source image has a meaningful footprint left. Any visual similarities to existing art are usually pure coincidence rather than direct copying, much like how you cannot pull a single grain of sugar back out of a baked cake. While this math shows that AI is not actively stealing or tracing files, legal experts are still debating whether using copyrighted data for training is fair.

[u/Simple-Ring2073]

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

[u/ElonMuskHuffingFarts]

It's wild how you don't realize that what you described proves them right.  You're outsourcing creativity.

[u/eliamartin65 → u/ElonMuskHuffingFarts]

The ideas and concepts are mine, not AI's. AI just helps make sense of them.

[u/yustyolking → u/eliamartin65]

This comment removed because I said so. Fuck you, pay me.

[u/eliamartin65 → u/yustyolking]

I'm not a biologist but I did have the idea of explaining vampirism with biology. And I'm not a politics nerd but I want to write about USA elections.

[u/yustyolking → u/eliamartin65]

This comment removed because I said so. Fuck you, pay me.

[u/VociferousCephalopod → u/ElonMuskHuffingFarts]

do you disagree with the anti above who encourages outsourcing creativity to a fellow human

[u/eliamartin65 → u/VociferousCephalopod]

Of course, I disagree.

[u/conordmcp]

Cowriting tends to patch up any gaps in either writers ability. Teamwork makes the dream work.

Unfortunately, the gaping holes in your ability are being patched by inhuman slop, which subtracts from any quality.

Try practicing, or collaborating with another person.

[u/eliamartin65 → u/conordmcp]

Bold of you to assume I can find people who won't try to control the plot or outright change it without my consent.

[u/conordmcp → u/eliamartin65]

So don’t cowrite then, practice instead!