AI is stealing writers’ words and jobs…

[Scribe]

OpenAI Heading To Hollywood To Pitch Revolutionary “Sora”

OpenAI is on the move in Hollywood, and that could spell trouble for many in the industry.

deadline.com

God I hope I die before the results of all this land.

 

[CapnZapp]

I wrote this hundreds of pages ago and I write this again:

The topic title of this thread is a lie.

Nothing says a segment of the workforce, called "writers", have or should have a monopoly on coming up with adventures and stories.

Just like with image creation, it is MUCH MUCH BETTER overall for everyone if these creative abilities can be put in the hands of EVERYONE.

If you and I can generate an adventure in five minutes, complete with NPCs their motivations and quality portraits, interesting maps, etc, then that is objectively and absolutely a good thing, and a good thing only.

tl;dr: nobody is stealing anything, in exact same manner textile mills didn't "steal" the jobs of seamstresses in the eighteenth century.

 

[Art Waring]

Nothing says a segment of the workforce, called "writers", have or should have a monopoly on coming up with adventures and stories.

I honestly think you are missing the point here, content that freelance writers make for d&d is owned by wotc, not by the writers. What exactly is this monopoly you are talking about???

A majority of artists and writers don't own the rights to their own work due to the nature of freelance work. The client typically gets exclusive rights unless you and the artist/ writer come to some other kind of agreement.

This is kind of comment is completely removed from reality. Freelance writers don't have any kind of monopoly on writing, they don't even own what they made for your dnd games.

 

[Art Waring]

Just like with image creation, it is MUCH MUCH BETTER overall for everyone if these creative abilities can be put in the hands of EVERYONE.

Except creative people have spent their entire lives honing their craft, and they share their talent with the world by providing a service (ala freelancers). Taking that lifetime of experience, bottling it into gen-ai tools, and refusing to get consent, or to provide credit or compensation is destroying jobs.

People who have honed their creative abilities should be able to make a living off of those talents. Writers, actors, artists, and musicians all work to entertain YOU, and hopefully earn enough to pay rent this month.

It seems like you are putting value on the creative output, while erasing any value the writer/ artist has in creating or contributing to your entertainment. Should artists just give away everything for free?

 

[Scribe]

Should artists just give away everything for free?

I think the implication would be "Thanks for your efforts, you are now replaced by this chat window."

 

[CapnZapp]

People who have honed their creative abilities should be able to make a living off of those talents.

It is clearly better if billions can produce pictures and words than if only millions can do it.

 

[trappedslider]

God I hope I die before the results of all this land.

 

[trappedslider]

turns out AI can be trained to be a narc

Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments

San Jose invited tech companies to mount cameras on a vehicle in what appears to be first-of-its-kind experiment

www.theguardian.com

 

[CapnZapp]

turns out AI can be trained to be a narc

turns out AI can be trained at all kinds of visual recognition, many of which are profoundly helpful and will improve everybody's lives.

AI is the tool. Don't be angry at the tool, be angry at the wielder.

AI can recognize cancer on x-ray plates better than a human. It can apparently also find homeless shelters. Okay.

 

[Art Waring]

It is clearly better if billions can produce pictures and words than if only millions can do it.

Well nothing is stopping them...

Except, this thread is about genarative-ai taking jobs, not about billions of people using gen-ai for personal uses. We are specifically talking about professional writers & artists that are being replaced by current & future gen-ai tools.

To reiterate for the 100th time: Data scraping methods result in training models like LAION-5B, which were created for "research purposes" and are intended for non-commercial purposes due to the fact that the models were trained on both public & copyrighted data. Data to which they don't have the rights to use for commercial purposes, such as paid subscription models.

Using that data without getting consent from the copyright holders should be a breech of copyright, but this is being argued in court in both directions as we speak. Big tech claims "fair use," saying anything on the internet is up for grabs. Writers & artists, and now large publication companies like the NYT are suing OpenAI & others over copyright claims.

The reality is that this will likely take a decade or more to fully resolve itself, as laws always lag behind the development of new technology.

In the meantime, disruption to jobs, especially creative fields are particularly effected by these changes.

Changes in technology used to take time, allowing workers some time for transitioning into new skills. Generative-ai has completely removed that transition period, appropriating your lifetime of experience and training into a machine that can now do your job.

Artists are being dumped by clients, some openly telling artists that they are not being hired because the client decided that gen-ai was good enough for them (ahem, they really meant free). That artist may not be able to pay rent now, because their commercial work is drying up.

Nobody cares what you do on your own with gen-ai. We are talking about companies using gen-ai in a commercial product in place of an artist.
Also, to be fair to writers too, I see a lot of disruption to writers happening with GPT-like apps. Notes from the article below:

• Emily Hanley is a freelance copywriter, writer, and comedian.
• She said she started losing work when clients decided to use ChatGPT instead of hiring a copywriter.
• Hanley says that if a robot can do your job for less, it'll end up doing that.

Clients were simply unwilling to pay for copywriting any longer unless that writer could also provide email management and a funnel-building system, most likely because of the newfound popularity of ChatGPT. Most of my clients were small businesses, startups, and young brands, which are typically the first to adapt to new technology to cut costs — aka me.

While I and countless other out-of-work copywriters are the first wave of AI collateral, the collapse of my profession is probably just the tip of the AI iceberg. Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that artificial intelligence led to nearly 4,000 job losses in May.

Its been a rough year, and its probably going to get a bit rougher for a bit for creatives. Keep your head up, and try to be kind to each other. While gen-ai might take away your job, it can't take away your dignity.

Peace.