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.
There’s no point in trying to protect your work from AI. It is or will eventually be “leagally” or illegally scrapped, and AI will mimic your style and keep stamping pieces of your works left and right. That’s a fact.
But what also is a fact is that the only thing it can do is just mimic you but never become you. So if you enjoy writing and people enjoy reading your works, keep doing it, be creative and “beat” AI shit by just being yourself.
You can’t fight AI by stopping writing and keeping all your thoughts to yourself (or a little gated community), but you can fight for your place in people’s minds and hearts to be filled by your work and not AI slop.
There’s already tons of slop filling the whole internet, but here we are, reading your post and responding to you because we consciously chose you and not AI slop :)
We all know and love Spongebob, but I have no clue who that green guy even is (I didn’t watch the full cartoon).
That’s Poseidon. And that scene is a perfect example. Poseidon uses his magic and makes a crap ton of look-alike crabby patties. They look perfect. He spreads them to the crowd. Everybody is happy. They take a bite… and everyone spits them out, because they’re the worst tasting garbage anyone has ever tasted. SpongeBob, on the other hand, uses his love and makes one. Poseidon takes a bite, loves it so much, tears up, spits it out, and because he’s a demigod, spits it out into a perfectly reshaped crabby patty, and eats it again, because he can’t bring himself to live with not having tasted it twice.