None of the above. Every professional in the world, including me, owes our careers to looking at examples of other people’s work and incorporating their work into our own work without paying a penny for it. Freely copying and imitating what we see around us has been a human norm for thousands of years - in a process known as “the spread of civilization”. Relatively recently it was demonized - for purely business reasons, not moral ones - by people who got rich selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittance known as a “royalty”. That little piece of bait on the hook has convinced a lot of people to put a black hat on behavior that had been considered normal forever. If angry modern enlightened justice warriors want to treat a business concept like a moral principle and get all sweaty about it, that’s fine with me, but I’m more of a traditionalist in that area.
Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.
The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.
When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.
These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.
None of the above. Every professional in the world, including me, owes our careers to looking at examples of other people’s work and incorporating their work into our own work without paying a penny for it. Freely copying and imitating what we see around us has been a human norm for thousands of years - in a process known as “the spread of civilization”. Relatively recently it was demonized - for purely business reasons, not moral ones - by people who got rich selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittance known as a “royalty”. That little piece of bait on the hook has convinced a lot of people to put a black hat on behavior that had been considered normal forever. If angry modern enlightened justice warriors want to treat a business concept like a moral principle and get all sweaty about it, that’s fine with me, but I’m more of a traditionalist in that area.
Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.
The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.
When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.
These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.