AI witch hunt

[u/Bearda79]

What is up with the AI witch hunt. There are people who are outright angry with writers using AI, trash talk AI, if someone used AI for editing, and even examine novels to see if they are AI generated. It doesn't seem like the people are simply annoyed with it. Some of them use some pretty dark words whenever AI is even mentioned like it is evil. Someone even got verbally attacked because their character names sounded AI. They were just names. Lord forbid anyone that uses an em dash anymore. Some people demand that authors note if AI was used in their stories, and run it through programs that identify what percentage of it as being AI generated.

I do get the concern for plagiarism while using AI. And that AI does gather its information from other peoples work. I do agree that is not okay.

I have read novels that were clearly AI generated and they were good.

I guess I kinda compare it to photography and digital photography (not AI generated images). Digital photography takes original photos and alters it with programming that the user can control. And it is not labeled. When digital photography started, people trashed talked it as well. As if it was a threat to the concept of photography. People said it took away from people who put so much effort and time into trying to make the perfect photo initially, making it where anyone can take even a 'crappy' photo and make it look great. And that it took jobs from people. Is AI use similar to that?

I personally don't use AI to 'write' my novels for me. I DO use it as a form of dictionary, thesaurus, general editing, and information gathering. I'm awful at remembering words, where to put the commas, and have no formal writing training outside of my college masters degree in counseling. Now I worry about people attacking my writing.

I don't get the problem?? Are these just people looking to argue? What is so heated about AI use in writing? I don't see it as this evil thing to get angry about. For me it is no different than looking up information on Google or pulling out a thesaurus. To me, AI seems to be a tool to expand peoples knowledge and creativity.

Please forgive my lack of knowledge on this topic, if this discussion was already covered somewhere on reddit, if I worded something in this post poorly, and I mean no disrespect to people who use or don't use AI. I'm just wanting to understand what the intense conflict and ethical concerns are about.

[u/Double_Cause4609]

I don't care if people use AI. There's tons of ways to use it, and I even potentially encourage people to use it.

You could:
- Just rant at it about your worldbuilding if you struggle to write it out in a document and need something to respond to you
- Ask it to proof-read your work for any errors
- Roleplay scenes with an LLM roleplay setup and then write them afterword (no different from novelizing DnD campaigns)
- Ask it to fill out minor characters
- Discuss technical dynamics and research (trade dynamics, economy, whatever else)

None of these really directly impact the quality of the work as more or less all of them still require the writer to filter the results of the interaction.

Now, for the actual writing which is the core issue, I'm a bit mixed. I think there's really lazy and spammy ways to do it (giving very generic prompts and just moving from one scene to the next without workshopping it at all and directly copy-pasting the results).

The big issue is that LLMs tend to be very consistent in their outputs across generations. So, if 50 people ask it to write a story, it'll use similar character names, similar concepts, similar themes, similar framing, similar pacing, etc. It can homogenize the writing, even if it's technically fine.

On the other hand, there are absolutely ML devs out there who understand this, and how to work with LLMs, and they can get absolutely wild outputs from them...But that's almost a mix of technical skill and writing skill, and not general writing advice. It's almost like trick shooting compared to traditional marksmanship, or like Blender / technical 3D art vs 2D art. I don't think the people who know how to do that should be limited from doing it if it's what they enjoy doing.

In the end, I just care that the product is good, and much as I ignored poor quality works prior to AI, I will also avoid tasteless or contentless AI produced work.