A friend pointed me to novelist Chuck Wendig’s newsletter a few weeks ago and I keep thinking of that last bit (you’ll see). He’s responding to a member of the Horror Writers Association board defending her use of AI for writing. His style can be chaotic but his points are flawless:
It’s very serious to us [writers]—a theoretically-existential threat!—to have our work taken without our permission and used to feed gluttonous software designed by techbros who literally say the quiet parts out loud when they talk about how it’ll destroy jobs, how we’re all gonna have to move to the fucking moon or instead live in a bunker beneath a data center somewhere, how if they actually had to pay creators for licensing rights they’d be bankrupt. They steal our work, they throw it into the machine like so much coal, and then use it to enrich themselves while simultaneously harming the environment and poisoning the fidelity of all our information systems. It is very clear that they want to treat information and knowledge as a resource to be mined—a utility to control, one that can be leveraged to extract payment from us. We and our work are all just material—Capital-C Content—to be melted down into slag.
So yeah! We’re kinda fucking mad about it! And when we see someone we like using it, we kinda want to kick some sand onto your shoes. You look like a sell-out. Like someone who just sold his buddy to the Cannibal Farm down the road.
Here’s the part that stuck with me:
If you wanna use AI, I can’t stop you.
But I can definitely give you a look like you just giddily shit your pants on a crowded train. That’s not me bullying you. That’s me acknowledging you shat yourself willfully and with joy and now we’re all having to deal with it.
You make your choices.
