The Fear Of AI Just Killed A Very Useful Tool

Statistical analysis of existing literary works is certainly not the same sort of thing as generating new literary works based on models trained on old ones.

A tool called Shaxpir creates a score sheet of literature, and many authors don't like that.

Saved you a click.

Also, down-vote click bait so it doesn't trend on Lemmy, please.

A tool that counts "total words".

That was a Unix program written 50 years ago called "wc", which stands for "word count".

AI people just love to disingenuously claim that anybody who criticizes AI "fears" the technology. This is their way of dismissing all critics or skeptics as luddites, and is usefully based entirely on their desire to profit somehow off of the trend.

Artists don't "fear" AI... They simply want big tech billionaires to stop stealing their copyrighted art works or other intellectual property in the hopes of generating infinite junk "content".

If you want artists to embrace AI, then you'd better be willing to stay paying them to license their artwork for AI training.

So THIS is the article that has all those writers on Bluesky ranting.

For me, I don't see HOW this is a useful tool at all. It's.. a word counter. It counts the number of times you use a word. Someone had a screencap of his "vividness" rankings on words, and it had placed "wintery" at a higher score than "permafrost." Why? How does it know that one word is more vivid than the other? what's the standard here? This sort of thing is very subjective.

And he starts with Vonnegut's shape of stories, but an LLM can't recognize rising and falling action so how could it do such a comparison?

Honestly, the WHOLE thing sounds like he's trying to create a formula for good writing, and you can't pin down good writing like that.

This is not a useful tool. It's a tool that will get people caught in the weeds like they do with narrative outlines like the Hero's Journey and lists of tropes. It will churn out a bunch of writers people don't like who can't understand why they don't catch on when they are following all the rules.

The tool is kinda bad for writers, rather than good, but it was totally done right. It didn't do anything to republish or redistribute at all. The complaints are akin to someone objecting to a critic rating their book by objective means.

Shit, if anyone gave a shit about my books, I'd godmother volunteer them for the guy to use.

This is sad but understandable. Authors, most of whom don't make enough money to call it a career, are being kicked from every side. In just the last handful of years, you have AI companies training on their works, companies demonstrating they're open to replacing writers with AI, the Internet Archive giving their books away for free, states trying to ban more and more books, etc. When you're kicked enough, everything looks like a threat.

Similar to music, I imagine there's going to need to be some shift in the industry but I don't think we've seen what that is yet. Patreon, physical merch, and live performances just don't seem to work as well for authors as they do for musicians.

That being said, this particular site is clearly fair use and I'm surprised AI was even mentioned anywhere in the conversation.

This will only fuck them in the ass later on.

Really good read, idk what the downvotes are about.

Yeah I'm totally with you.

I would even go as far as saying: an AI that trains on released books and can write new texts shouldn't be seen as bad either. Yes there is a lingering question about compensating writers in some way, but looking at how these tools work basically makes you realize, it will never generate a text as good as an original writer on its own. It can only ever be less than all the median of all the works collected. And it will not store the original works, it only learns the style they are written in.

And I'm kind of scared as well. If we don't make AI happen and figure out the right monetization systems for it, another country will, and they might give zero fucks and start crawling the works anyway. We'll just lose the upper hand on the development.

And I am saying that as someone who will be on the other end too, soon. I am a music producer, developer and I do 3d compositions. I am a bit scared of what's about to change but mostly just stoked to see what different aspects of my work will become more and less important.

I still believe change is good. And I always will.

I don't really understand the tool itself especially as I am not a writer, but if you’re going to make this argument, you have to actually make the much harder argument that after a decade of the gig economy we should trust these tech bros to not lobby against mitigating the downside, or to trust institutions to disregard their lobbying

I'm gonna need a list of them so I can not buy their books plz.