ChatGPT cannot imagine freedom or alternatives; it can only present you with plagiarized mash-ups of the data it’s been trained on. So, if generative AI tools begin to form the foundation of creative works and even more of the other writing and visualizing we do, it will further narrow the possibilities on offer to us. Just as previous waves of digital tech were used to deskill workers and defang smaller competitors, the adoption of even more AI tools has the side effect of further disempowering workers and giving management even further control over our cultural stories.
As Le Guin continued her speech, she touched on this very point. “The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art,” she explained. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” That’s exactly why billionaires in the tech industry and beyond are so interested in further curtailing how our words can be used to help fuel that resistance, which would inevitably place them in the line of fire.
[…]
The stories and artworks that resonate with us are inspired by the life experiences of artists who made them. A computer can never capture a similar essence. Le Guin asserted that to face the challenging times ahead, we’ll need “writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.” Generative AI seems part of a wider plan by the most powerful people in the world to head that off, and to trap us in a world hurtling toward oblivion as long as they can hold onto their influence for a little longer.
As Le Guin said, creating art and producing commodities are two distinct acts. For companies, generative AI is a great way to produce even more cheap commodities to keep the cycle of capitalism going. It’s great for them, but horrible for us. It’s our responsibility to challenge the technology and the business model behind it, and to ensure we can still imagine a better tomorrow.
Once again, the “plagiarism machine” misunderstanding of how LLMs operate. It’s simply not true. They don’t “mash up” their training material any more than a human “mashes up” their training material. They learn patterns from their training material. Is a human author who writes yet another round of the Hero’s Journey creating a “plagiarized mash-up” of past stories? When a poet writes yet another sonnet, are they just aping past poems they’ve seen?
And even if it were so, complaints like these are self-contradictory. If LLM output really is just boring old retreads of stuff that went before, why are they a “threat” to skilled human authors who can produce new material? If those human authors really are inherently better than the LLMs, what’s the big deal? It’s not like it’s a new thing for there to be content farms and run-of-the-mill stories churned out en mass. Creative authors have always had to compete with that kind of thing. Nobody’s “curtailing” them, they’re just competing with them. Go ahead and compete right back.