and while you're at it, Spotify is evil and their playlists are just algorithms.

“Grammarly is voluntary spyware” - My counterpart at a government agency at a meeting we both attended

I find Grammarly suspect in intent. Pay attention in 4th grade, for pity's sake.

Damn job-stealin' robuts!

Convincing people born in the digital age it's better to do some things old school is an uphill battle.

that's why I find the uproar from visual artists about Lensa so annoying

as though they're somehow a special case

Does grammarly reproduce writers copyrighted work?

Because I have friends whose published paintings are being reproduced, with entire sections including signatures being used by the algorithms.

If someone cut entire chapters out of a published work, including the authors foreword and signature and sold it as their own, that would be what Lensa does.

Generative AI systems are in their infancy and Lensa seems especially clumsy. On the other hand, I know people who would try to pass off collages as original art. Some music manufacturers will include whole sections of others' work in their own too.

dkronfeld: The tug of war between protecting the work of living creators vs recognizing the influence of current work on new creations is an ongoing battle. The big difference here is that human judgement and accountability has been removed.

So you get the KFC in Germany’s Twitter feed encouraging people to celebrate Kristallnacht with chicken strips. And apps like Lensa lifting characteristic and recognizable features from the work of living artists. And the communities hit hardest are the same ones that are already having their work scraped by Chinese counterfeiters and scammers.

Not really, no, or at least no more so than has been in the past: Copy-and-paste(sound, images, text, or whatever) is just as "violating", but with something like Lensa a human sill has to decide what to do with the generated work.

These are folks either managing to pay their bills barely by making art full time, or more frequently working full time and creating when they can. And when faced with their work being stolen and no recourse they just give up. My Facebook feed is literally full of artists dealing with this every day.

I hear what you are saying, and the lack of editors (and proofreaders) in the modern world makes my teeth hurt. We have to draw the line somewhere if we are going to have art in our lives.

I don't think art is in any more danger of vanishing as a result of AI than (let's say) hand made furniture was as a result of mass production. Good artists will continue to make their livings by producing good art and good scam artists will continue to get rich by convincing gullible "experts" that their shit is brilliant.

People with jobs in illustration and graphic design may be in trouble though.

And nothing stops any of us from brining art into the world just because machines can do it "better" any more than we're stopped from playing chess just because no human can beat the best machines.

My Instagram feed is filled with complaints that AI is hurting artists’ incomes more than specific instances of IP misuse. Thus my complaint that these same people have ignored previous and ongoing AI developments that hurt other creatives.

Selling art is in no way necessary for us to have art in our lives. In fact I could argue (looking around my immediate RL neighborhood) that artists who are most successful professionally will have their work in the fewest homes.

Otenth, I love ya but in this case I have to disagree completely.

about what, exactly?

do you not think that Grammarly provides sub-optimal editing at the expense of editors? Do you think that Spotify's business model is good for independent artists, and that their playlists are better than what a DJ could produce? Do you think that visual artists are somehow better or more important than other creatives?

Do you believe art only happens when it is paid for? How many $5,000-20,000 pieces of original art do you think the average person is going to buy?

I don't think art is going to vanish. I see artists vanishing now, which breaks my heart. Because in this case the reason is one that can be and should be addressed. Theft of IP is not a new technology that eliminates a trade. Theft puts all kinds of folks out of business and nobody argues that this is just evolution.

AI and algorithms are just tools. Not good or evil, they are just computers doing computations. In the cases of the apps under discussion those tools are being used to steal IP and sell it for profit. Just like someone stealing an artist's work and using their photos to sell counterfeits online is IP theft.

If I take a favorite quote from a Neil Gaiman book and crank out tshirts or use a program to take chunks of his books and bung them together to sell on Amazon then I am unquestionably stealing and it is immediately actionable by his legal team. Why would it be different for an artist whose work is being stolen the same way?

Spell check isn't stealing anyone's IP, I don't know from Grammarly but I assume if it was plagiarizing copyrighted material they would be having legal trouble as well. It is not an equivalent thing.

Lensa is an aberration, so you may be able to make an argument about IP theft for it specifically (though there is a lot of precedent in Lensa’s favour). But generative systems in general can’t be accused of that any more than human artists who lean from and are influenced by other artists.

My disagreement is in the difference between scraping artwork from unaware artists, and providing crappy editing services. Does Grammarly pull directly from any editors out there?

Fogwoman CeejayWriter I’m sorry, but as long as you focus solely on IP infringement rather than the economic complaints I brought up, we are just talking past one another.

Otenth: I understand what you are saying. You are addressing the complaint that people are going to lose their jobs to computer programs, which is already happening in other fields. I had the same argument early in this discussion. Our current culture is moving into a world very much like the Industrial Revolution.

Handcrafted quality has given way to fast and cheap - published journalism and literature are now full of the kinds of errors that would have given any moderately competent editor apoplexy back in the day. Clothing is being made and sold to wear once and throw away. Cheap and disposable is nearly impossible to avoid. And so it has hit the visual arts too.

And I think that is covered by the general AI creating art, or literature, or moderating social media platforms. But products like Lensa have crossed a line by incorporating theft while making the buggy whip argument. And that line is fuzzy and apparently not yet legally defined.

So we encounter the same argument we saw a lot in SL "If it is possible, it is legal". Even legitimate organizations get called out frequently because someone has yanked copyrighted materials from somebody's website and reposted it without citations. And we have platforms with that activity as a business model like Pinterest.

Their argument is that it is the responsibility of the user to ensure that they are not violating the law. But in the case of platforms like Lensa, I am inputting content that I own outright, but the output winds up containing other people's IP due to the actions of the programmers. Even if it is technically legal, it is unethical. And undisclosed.

I'll bow out, so you can keep the debate focused. I'm a terrible debater and get easily overwhelmend. Have at it!

I use Grammarly. It's a godsend for not native english speakers that have to write in english. Even something as simple as a komma is different in english and dutch.

And I can't afford an editor, like most small independent artists I have to do it all myself

AI seems a very different subject to me

Grammarly is AI, and when it's marketed to graduate students, it is competing with editors who specialize in working on theses and academic papers.

All of the newer grammar recommendation programs are based on things like Google search, Siri, and Alexa learning how humans actually speak. Chatbots can already write from scratch some pretty convincing essays.

I acknowledge the IP concerns about Lensa in particular and the visual database it depends on. But the underlying practice of machines learning from human examples and eventually replacing human creatives is widespread.

People tend only to pay attention to things that directly affect them or people they know, and in the case of visual artists complaining that Lensa is competing with their business, I felt the need to vent that none of them seem to have noticed or cared about ways that AI is competing with me.

And I will repeat: my experience on my social media was artists complaining about competition. They were not complaining about IP infringement, and in many cases had no idea it was an issue. Some of them still don't care about that, even after the issue has been raised.

As a former journalist and current artist, I see it very different from you. Grammarly is a help, like a calculator, or an accountant program. It saves time to do the real thing. AI is taking over the artistic work right now.

No editor in the world would be against a program that saves them from placing comma's at the right place, so they can focus on the important stuff

It's the difference between a tool for creative work and creative work itself

The word editor covers a lot of different work area's and I can only speak for editor in journalism and writing, but their jobs have been changing and in some cases become obsolete for a long time. Because of the nature of their jobs, which was helping writers.

Writers publish their own books now, journalists make podcasts and blogs and stuff.

Basically "the underlying practice of machines learning from human examples" goes for everything from handheld hammers to assembly lines to photoshop. Anyways, I am not complaining about my job as a 3D artist being taken over by AI. Just as I didn't complain when my job as a journalist was taken over by, I guess the internet. I adapted. It is life.

I see a difference though between original work, like creating, building, artistry, writing and such being taken over by AI and "help" work being taken over like editing, accounting and such.

It's going way, way, way beyond advice on commas (or apostrophes) now and in the near future. We're very, very rapidly approaching the point at which I can ask a system to create a 3D model of a bed that's suitable use in Second Life, giving it a vague description of desired characteristics, and have it create a series of beds from which to choose.

Otenth: I was hearing the same things about AI previous to Lensa and had the exact same reaction you did. I feel like Lensa is defining the line that needs to be drawn between public domain work and copyright, for a technological age. We have precedents, although they are constantly debated as well.

Your specialty is being ditched for fast and cheap as well, by what have been the paragons of writing for a lot of generations. I was brought up when newspapers were the examples of correct writing. If that is still the case then we are seeing the evolution of language again. Back to phonetics and context to try and suss meaning.

Plagiarism is the realm of scholarly papers in my world, with publish or perish driving predatory journals, unconsenting co authorship and massive copying of text and graphics. There the penalties are retraction, possible firing and sometimes removal of academic degrees. Only legal penalties are if you commit fraud on grants

Fogwoman when I found out that "self-plagiarism" is a thing in some fields, it blew my mind.

Right, but everyone does that

Otenth: Yeah, reading Retraction Watch is eye opening and sometimes horrifying.

Just wanted to say a couple things, (still intimidated by actual, awesome debates, I'm following this one avidly), first, Joe Straczynski has had a policy for decades now about his stance on story ideas. This doesn't connect with any specific thing mentioned by any of you, but I think it's a stance everyone should be aware of.

It's his rule one, and you can read it here. https://www.patreon.com/...

Secondly, as a fiction editor, I don't think AI-editing will ever be more than a passing fad. There's just too much that's subjective, especially in developmental editing and coaching. That's mostly what I do these days.

Proofreading and maybe even copyediting could be done in AI ways, but I think I'd be able to pick out the AI proofed book from a lineup. At least I'd love to try that challenge.

Yes, the current editing tools require a human operator, or they return substandard results (of course, human editors using search and replace can do that too!). But the current openai chatbot points towards machine-written text.

Here's a short story I just asked it for:

One day, a little girl named Sophia was out playing ...

this is the prompt I gave it: write a 75-word short story about a lost dog, a little girl, and a deep well

Oh, and Ann Leckie and John Scalzi have the same policy about story ideas. Ann has a tag she requests people use on Tumblr so she won't see certain types of things.

If I weren't tired and ready for a nap, I would take that little dog/girl/well story and give it my editing advice, just for the hell of it!

But it is disconcertingly adequate. Not good - justadequate.

yep. not good, but adequate. I've seen short essays on the founding of Jamestown, and descriptions of how various AI models work--and then a response to a simplified version, and then the simplified version in Klingon. And the chatbot I used is interactive, so I could give it editorial direction for a revision of the story.

You have me curious. What chatbot are you using?

ChatGPT

CoyoteAngel DimSum and Zenmondo Wormser are both playing around with it.

It's all the rage this week

Thank you! I will poke at it tomorrow - all in the name of Know Thy Enemy!