Writers Against AI

With apologies to those writers among us who have been familiar with the label and the conviction for a long time now, I’m new. The immediate source of both words and image is an essay by Paul Kingsnorth (https://www.writersagainstai.net/essay) which I first accessed this morning, and which is likely to be on my mind for some time. The essay argues the case for the fundamental, essential humanity of stories (human beings’ way of representing and sharing the experience of time, as Hayden White put it). The case Kingsnorth makes for the threat ai poses to stories and so, effectively, to humanity is strong and convincing, and it’s all distilled into a rather elegant (I think) logo by Justin Clark…shown here.

I’m sympathetic, on the whole. I’m also haunted by the sense that the vast reservoirs of anger and confusion that swirl around this topic can’t be reduced to “for” and “against”.  I think of the writing of Manny Rayner, for example, who treats  Goodreads — I’m in the habit of checking in — as one of his platforms. He really IS a writer, as well as a specialist in computational linguistics and a chess master. Anyway, he slips in reviews of new-ish ai models as “books” to review, usually when he’s discovered something really positive about them. I don’t doubt that he is as appalled as anyone at the insults and rot that ai is steadily serving us — it’s hardly news.  But recently, he and a friend adapted a Chat-GPT model to learn conversational German. They found a conversation partner who doesn’t laugh at your mistakes, doesn’t get bored or tired or distracted and is endlessly patient with you. That IS news. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1834894.Manny_Rayner