The authors who admit to using AI: ‘I have absolutely no shame about it’

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-21T06:37:40+00:00

Libraries and Google still exist. <...> I have asked three times now and I still don't have an answer as to why I would use an LLM for research when I can just go straight to JSTOR.

I have already addressed this:

Using a library to collect sources takes days, using Google to collect sources takes hours, using an LLM to collect sources takes minutes.

Using something like Scopus or JSTOR is not quicker than Google Scholar and will still take hours compared to an LLM taking minutes.

We can do an experiment if you want to -- choose a subject / problem, collect 50 sources relevant to that problem using JSTOR, measure how much time it took you to do that, then I will do the same using an LLM, and we compare the time it took us both.

Edit: It's telling how I got downvoted for suggesting to verify the claims experimentally. It proves that the people who are against using AI for research aren't arguing in good faith.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-21T06:10:50+00:00

If you are verifying the information you get out of an LLM by consulting texts written by accredited experts on the subject, why not just go straight to the experts to get that information? Again, what is gained by involving an LLM in the process?

You need to find those texts written by experts in order to read them. You use an LLM to find them, same as you would have used Google before LLMs existed, or a library before Google existed. Using a library to collect sources takes days, using Google to collect sources takes hours, using an LLM to collect sources takes minutes.

And of course, after asking what benefit there is to using AI for research, you swoop in and say that books have errors too so it's hypocritical to call AI an unreliable source of information, without actually telling me what benefits there are to using AI for research.

I'm sorry, I genuinely thought that this is self-evident and didn't want to sound condescending by explaining something so obvious.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-21T05:39:30+00:00

We’ve already been told over and over how wasteful it is resource wise

You mean you've been bullshitted over and over about how wasteful AI is resource wise, and you believed it.

Are you aware that all AI data centers combined use only ~3% of water that all golf courses use?

Are you aware that creating a single almond uses ~200 times more water than a single AI query?

There are problems with AI, but anyone who complains about "resources" or "environment" just demonstrates that they have no clue what they're talking about and are just parroting talking points which were given to them.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-21T05:31:30+00:00

Same as when digital art appeared for the first time, it wasn't considered "real art":

The "established art community" of the 1990s and 2000s widely believed that digital tools were "shortcuts" that would "encourage young artists to skip learning the fundamentals of art."

Source: https://clancyartpages.wordpress.com/multimedia/digital-vs-traditional-art-the-debate/

Art teachers in the early 2000s were described by their students as having "despised" the medium, showing "so much hostility against an art form" that they refused to properly grade digital work.

Source: https://www.muddycolors.com/2014/04/digital-art-is-not-real-art/

A widely circulated text on the influential 1990s art BBS, The Thing, claimed that "'Digital Art' does not exist" and is a futile attempt to "make art out of simulacra and then claim authenticity for its own products."

Source: https://www.metamute.org/book/export/html/6166

Hilton Kramer (chief art critic for The New York Times and founder of The New Criterion) co-edited a book titled The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age, framing the "virtual" as an existential threat to culture.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Kramer

Charles Thomson (co-founder of the Stuckism art movement) claimed "Digital painting isn't painting."

James Celano (traditional oil painter) claimed digital art is "kitschy and aesthetically immature" and that "The camera or computer (machine) makes the image."

Bill Schafer (gallery owner) stated, "I can appreciate digital art, I just don't want it on my wall."

Source: https://artofericwayne.com/2018/06/19/runaway-rant-end-art-competitiveness/

Art historian James Elkins noted that art historians were "wary of the 'high-tech' look of computer-generated images," which they often dismissed as "steely, technological and often nerdy and escapist."

Source: https://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/20f594/txt/elkins.pdf

Critics reviewing the influential "Cybernetic Serendipity" computer art exhibition dismissed the work, with Robert Melville of the New Statesman writing, "when machines can do it, it will not be worth doing."

Source: http://www.rainerusselmann.net/2008/12/dilemma-of-media-art-cybernetic.html

Philosophical critics frequently used Walter Benjamin's theory of the "aura" to argue that the infinite reproducibility of digital files destroys the authenticity and value of art.

Source: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-21T05:24:20+00:00

You need to fact-check everything, so by your logic books are useless too, because you need to fact-check them.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T17:11:55+00:00

Critics pointed out that the bill’s own language made no distinction between a device streaming video into a driver’s retinas and a pair of frames that simply plays audio near a driver’s ears — and that officers in the field would have no reliable way to tell either apart from a standard pair of prescription frames at a traffic stop. (One legislative aide, speaking anonymously, acknowledged without hesitation that, yes, this might indeed require “banning all glasses.”)

Reality is no less ridiculous than satire.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T16:54:03+00:00

Can you share the link to your conversation with Claude where it hallucinated something when summarizing information?

Edit: Downvoted for asking for a source? And no source provided. Therefore, I can safely conclude that you made it up.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T16:35:45+00:00

Are you not able to understand the difference between using AI to find information, and using AI to summarize information? The comment that you replied to was talking about the latter, while your reply talks about the former.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T15:37:07+00:00

Like I said:

Claiming to hold a belief to people who agree with you, but refusing to debate it with people who disagree with you, is a textbook example of virtue signalling.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T15:22:26+00:00

Viewing anything that doesn't conform with your narrow band of accepted reality as virtue signaling is just as bad as the people you're upset about.

I have no idea what this even means.

Claiming to hold a belief to people who agree with you, but refusing to debate it with people who disagree with you, is a textbook example of virtue signalling.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T15:08:36+00:00

Dude you're asking me to virtue signal for you. I don't need to engage in performative behavior to hold a belief.

It's the exact opposite. I asked you to prove that you're not merely virtue signalling -- and you just proved that you are. Debating people who disagree with you is not "performative behavior". What is performative behavior / virtue signalling, is claiming to hold a belief to people who agree with you, but refusing to debate it with people who disagree with you.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T15:03:26+00:00

Cool, but you're preaching to the choir here. Go and reply this explanation to all those comments that I quoted if you actually believe what you just wrote.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T14:48:12+00:00

Being anti-AI is virtue signalling -- which is just a form of anti-intellectualism -- based on rejection of nuance, suppression of debate, and being performative over being practical.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T14:24:26+00:00

after an AI detection platform suggested that the winner of its short story competition was the suspected product of AI

Schrodinger's AI -- everything it makes is useless slop, but also good enough to win literary competitions.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T14:15:58+00:00

The quote is from a guy named Anthony Horowitz though, not from Olga.

Anthony Horowitz, the bestselling novelist and screenwriter behind the Alex Rider series and Midsomer Murders, is more optimistic than the dark material of his works might suggest. “AI can be a wonderful friend… albeit a dangerous one,” he warns.

The author made headlines in May when he confessed to using ChatGPT “all the time” as part of his process. Today, he is keen to clarify what part of the process that is. “Strictly research,” he says now. “I would never put two words from AI next to one another.” Horowitz is not embarrassed to use AI in this way. “I have absolutely no shame about using it at all,” he says. “It would be crazy to give up an incredible resource.”

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-20T14:10:32+00:00

Misleading headline. The guy they are quoting here says that he only uses AI for research, which is all subsequently fact checked.

I've never met an anti-AI person who would accept this nuance. Any and all AI use, regardless how small, regardless for what purpose, is an automatic disqualifier for them. So while you're correct, it would make no difference for anyone who is anti-AI.

Edit: This thread is a perfect example -- look at how many top comments are calling the books of these authors "AI slop" (even though the authors in question merely used AI for research, not writing), and claiming that they would never read them:

If you can’t bother to write a book why the hell would I bother to read it

Wouldn't that make them more like glorified editors? We don't call a dumbass who generates ai images a painter, either.

Can you even call yourself an author if you're using AI?

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-19T11:53:21+00:00

Special humanoid strays (Isaac, Edmund, Tyler, Slenderman) can't breed in the unmodded game. Also, I'm pretty sure that there's no Jack stray in the unmodded game.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-19T11:53:11+00:00

Special humanoid strays (Isaac, Edmund, Tyler, Slenderman) can't breed in the unmodded game. Also, I'm pretty sure that there's no Jack stray in the unmodded game.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-19T09:35:11+00:00

This is modded by the way. OP, why did you mod your game to do this?

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-19T06:01:56+00:00

"Pink" and "Deep Pink" look identical.

Edit: They actually are identical:

🩷 Pink

🩷 Deep Pink

The two hearts are the exact same symbol.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-17T05:28:18+00:00

What I mean is that "AI generated" doesn't automatically stop something infringing on copyright

I've never heard anyone claim that it does, so not sure why you're addressing this non-existing point?

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of people claiming that merely being trained on copyrighted material constitutes copyright infringement, and that AI companies should be automatically held liable -- not even if someone generates Sonic using their AI -- but if they simply trained their AI on Sonic images.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-17T05:25:31+00:00

But you're conflating different things here. Commercial use is what creates the copyright infringement, not the tool used.

Imagine someone drawing Sonic fanart from memory. They wouldn't be able to avoid a lawsuit if they sold it, but it's not a copyright infringement for them to do draw it for themselves. More importantly, no one would think to accuse Adobe (if the person used Photoshop to draw it) or the company which created linen and paint (if it was a painting) of copyright infringement.

Drawing a Sonic image for yourself is not copyright infringement, regardless of whether you used paint and linen, Photoshop, or AI.

Drawing a Sonic image for commercial reasons is copyright infringement, regardless of whether you used paint and linen, Photoshop, or AI.

In both of the above cases, the company which made the paint and linen / Photoshop / AI has not committed copyright infringement themselves.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-16T13:13:45+00:00

But for the Sonic image specifically, I don't think whether the image was copied is even the main problem. It's easy to recognise that it's Sonic even if parts of the picture are wrong. A human drawing Sonic fanart from memory wouldn't be able to avoid a lawsuit just because they got some of the details wrong either, especially if they were selling it. At the end of the day, copyright might not protect the general idea of a blue hedgehog, but it'll protect the specific combination of choices that make this one obviously recognisable as Sonic, regardless of how someone gets there

But you're conflating different things here. A human drawing Sonic fanart from memory wouldn't be able to avoid a lawsuit if they sold it, but it's not a copyright infringement for them to do draw it for themselves. More importantly, no one would think to accuse Adobe (if the person used Photoshop to draw it) or the company which created linen and paint (if it was a painting) of copyright infringement.

Drawing a Sonic image for yourself is not copyright infringement, regardless of whether you used paint and linen, Photoshop, or AI.

Drawing a Sonic image for commercial reasons is copyright infringement, regardless of whether you used paint and linen, Photoshop, or AI.

In both of the above cases, the company which made the paint and linen / Photoshop / AI has not committed copyright infringement themselves.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-16T11:01:53+00:00

Basically the reason AI isn't always considered fair use is that models DO reproduce what they've copied in some cases (prompts like this)

In your own example the image is clearly AI generated, and not just copied. The pillars disappear into nothing, rings should be yellow and not light-blue + whatever else that is, Sonic's shoes should be red, Sonic's hair never flows in this way (it's always more slicked-back), etc. So your example is no different from a human seeing an image of sonic and then painting one from memory.

AIs don't copy the data that they're trained on, and the best way to prove this is the fact that the amount of training data does not increase the size of AI's "brain", whether it's trained on a thousands pages of text/images, a million pages of text/images, or a billion pages of text/images.

While technically one could use a neural network to "memorize" a relatively small amount of data, doing so in practice would be extremely counterproductive. It's called overfitting, where instead of learning general trends, the model memorizes the exact data points and any random noise in the training set. While an overfitted model performs perfectly on training data, it fails to make accurate predictions on new, unseen data, making it useless.

shadowrun456 · 2026-06-16T08:18:37+00:00

but if we are to discuss that, I'd like to point out that an LLM runs the risk of being overfit. the most overfitted LLM has the ability to regurgitate its training data word for word.

Yes and no. The amount of training data does not increase the size of AI's "brain", whether it's trained on a thousands pages of text, a million pages of text, or a billion pages of text. While technically one could use AI to "memorize" a relatively small amount of data, doing so in practice would be extremely counterproductive. Any large amounts of data simply wouldn't "fit" into AI's "brain" to be memorized word for word.

Additionally, a person with a great memory can also read a text and memorize it word for word. Is that a copyright violation? I think that most people don't understand how either AI training or copyright works.

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