Hey anti-AI writers and creative people! Does anyone have advice for dealing with the knowledge that generative AI will probably be trained on any creative work you share outside of a tiny, offline community?
I used to write a lot, but I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to write anything real for a while. I start to get excited thinking about a writing project, and then I remember that whatever I share will most likely be used to build technology that I believe is actively harmful to humanity, and all my motivation drains away.
Several large chunks of my past writing have definitely been sucked into LLMs (multiple long stories about that, not getting into them here). I expect that something similar will eventually happen again if I share my writing in the future. I’ve been looking into ways to prevent LLM training on text, and as far as I can tell, there’s nothing that works well without severely limiting the reach of your writing.
I read and write partially to connect with other people. I’m not a best-selling author or trying to become one, but I want to connect with strangers and isolated people I’ll never meet in real life again, like I did with my past blogs and stories that were later sucked into LLM training. There’s something depressing about severely limiting the potential human reach of my writing (or any other kind of creative work) just to prevent nonconsensual scrapers and book scanners from getting it. That seems like another way of letting the AI industry win. I want to write and share with humans anyway, because those fuckers shouldn’t get to steal my own or anyone else’s joy, but I’m struggling to find my old motivation.
Does anyone have advice for dealing with this issue? Something that’s not just “accept that other people’s actions are out of your control” or “that just comes with the territory nowadays” or “everything in life has risks?” I love writing. I’ve really tried to come around to the “that just comes with the territory nowadays” mindset, but that hasn’t gotten rid of the demotivation. Most of the “writing motivation” advice I’ve found assumes that lack of motivation is rooted in fear of failure, setbacks, getting stuck in the middle of a project, working on the wrong project, etc. I need advice from people who understand this particular problem.
I’ll throw this question to people with more experience: but is LLM such a threat to copying authors as it is graphic artists and musicians? My thought it reading requires your full and sustained attention and while people will tolerate listening to AI music in the background, or scrolling past AI art, there is NOBODY who is willingly going to sit down to read slop.
Now if I were writing something technical, a step-by-step guide on how to do something, I would absolutely be furious if it got hoovered up by AI, probably butchered, and presenting on Google’s search page.
But if I were writing any kind of fiction, I would not be the least bit worried about an LLM stealing it because I’ve read LLM writing and it’s just obviously horrible, even for non-fiction. I imagine it would be infinitely worse for fiction where it has to describe a consistent reality.
Yes. There have been plenty of cases of people prompting an LLM to write “in the style of” of a specific author. There are also AI-generated books being sold on Amazon under real authors’ names, AI-generated books flooding self-publishing spaces, and plenty of other issues. Sometimes that stuff gets taken down, but most of it continues and makes it harder for real writers to gain visibility. On the technical side of things, if you want to run a “successful” blog with useful information these days, good luck. Google doesn’t send nearly as many people to actual websites today, mostly because of AI overviews, and a lot of AI-powered SEO content is outranking the human writing in SERPs. Sites like Medium are also mostly AI slop now. Human writers are getting crowded out.
Much worse, a lot of real writers have been falsely accused of using AI. This is more of an issue if you blog or write articles, but it’s happened in fiction too. People will run your work through “AI detectors” even though none of them are that reliable. I’ve run into this issue before with my past writing (some things I wrote were “detected” as 20-60% AI-generated). AI is trained off of human writing patterns, so inevitably, people who have had their work over-represented in training data end up having AI-like writing patterns when really it’s the AI that sounds like them.
I hate what AI has done to writing communities, too. People accuse writers of using AI on social media all the time. The site where I posted fiction as a teen has a lot of unlabeled AI-generated stories these days, and it’s known that a lot of older stories were scraped, so things are looking worse for the next generation of writers.
I’ve also felt a huge decline in respect for writers of all kinds since 2022. A lot of people don’t read that closely and genuinely believe a chatbot’s output is equivalent, or at least good enough. And some of the people who do read closely are more suspicious. Like I said, there are plenty of false accusations of AI use going around. It’s just a much more antagonistic environment to write in.
And those are just some of my issues with AI. I really, really hate being forced to contribute to the technology causing all this bullshit.
That is really distressing. Reading is such a great use of your brain, I can’t imagine thinking AI content is “good enough.”
My thinking, to get you back to writing, is that LLMs kind of suck, and maybe you don’t want to participate in communities any more because AI has poisoned them, but I truly don’t think all the training in the world can improve LLMs. In fact, I think its been clearly demonstrated at this point that it can’t. So, yes, you will probably be scraped by AI, but I am thinking you are contributing nothing to it improving. LLMs have already hit their limits, afaict.