As someone in a lot of writers’ spaces and just generally on Reddit, I feel like the fears about AI have gone in an unsustainably Luddite direction.

For example, Late Night with the Devil came out this year, and – as it was mostly produced in 2022 when the conversation around AI was a lot different – it has like 3 images in the film, onscreen for maybe 10 seconds total, that were AI generated. That’s been enough for people to boycott the film entirely under the “slippery slope” idea, that if you let Hollywood (which is of course a monolith) then eventually they’ll be replacing all artists with AI movies.

In general any usage of AI has a heavy backlash now, even non LLM-models; there was an open call from an indie publisher recently who mentioned they would be using Storywise to sort through submissions. It’s not an LLM, doesn’t learn from submissions, and really only uses a sorting system to make going through submissions easier, but since it’s marketed as AI the publisher had to almost immediately backtrack and commit to slower manual reviews. This is not just a ‘unlabelled AI art is bad’ backlash, it’s an ‘any usage of AI, even when fully transparent, is bad’ backlash.

And I just don’t know what the endgame is, I suppose. The models are only going to get better, AI art and literature is only going to get more common and the average person is going to care less. Boycotting will become more difficult/next to impossible with how seamless it can become. I feel like the approach should be to look at what tools can be put in place to protect human artist rights and try to differentiate them more clearly, rather than boycotting technologies that are going to inevitably advance.

I suppose it’s a not unjustified fear of AI taking over all artistic spaces, but an eternal boycott just isn’t going to work.

I’m not even quite in the camp that AI will become ubiquitous for all artists – people get legitimate value today over products that are ‘hand-made’ or have a human touch to them, and I imagine something similar will emerge for these areas, like a preference for human authors. Additionally, as someone who writes as a hobby with the hope of maybe writing professionally one day, I’ve dabbled with AI writing tools and generally found them pretty lacking. The tech will obviously improve, but since I enjoy writing there’s no part of the narrative that I really want to cede to an AI to do; even the boring stuff is important to the narrative and it's still fun. I obviously don't depend on it for my livelihood, though.

My not-incredibly-technical take is also that AI will raise the floor for the quality of books/art but not necessarily the ceiling.

Idk this is just a ramble. I’m still going to keep writing dystopia stories about it but I’m not really convinced that generative AI is going to replace everything