Hey — two of my favorite things: my complete inability to write well and imitative AI screwing up something else nice!
The Seattle Worldcon — the premiere science fiction and fantasy literary convention, run in a different city each year — apparently used imitative AI to help determine who would be invited to panels. This did not go over well for reasons that should have been obvious to anyone remotely connected to writers. This kind of screw up highlights both the reason people want to use imitative AI and the reasons that no one should use imitative AI, at least as a time saver.
The convention committee released statements stating that they intended to use imitative AI to help search for information about prospective panelists. It was meant, they said, to save time and efforts by the volunteers. Now, anyone who thought that writers were going to be, as a class, just fine with the use imitative AI is either an idiot or has been living in a cave for the last three years. Imitative AI systems have stolen the work of writers in order to train the models that imitative AI systems use to generate their results. Telling writers that their invitation to a panel at the premiere writing conference in their genre depended upon imitative AI is going to be deeply offensive to a significant portion of said writers. Almost as important, the idea that you could save time by aggregating search results through an imitative AI system is galactically stupid.
Imitative AI makes shit up. That, literally, is how it works — it calculates what words should come next based on its training data. It has no model of the world and cannot tell truth from fiction. You have to check everything it produces very carefully. It will confidently lie to you about anything, because it doesn’t have the concept of lying to begin with. Did you know I am a published author? I am not, obviously. It does say Failed Writer’s Journey on the sign above the door after all. But ChatGPT will confidently assign tittles to me by other people, other people who do not share my name, or claim that I am a different person altogether. This level of bullshit can only save people time if they don’t actually check. Otherwise, it is just adding an extra step to a vetting process.
I suspect that the volunteers did not double check the material. I suspect that the volunteers were asked to do more vetting with less resources, including time, because, hey, they had a fancy new imitative AI tool to help them out! Surely, they could get more done! In fact, the first statement by the convention claims that hundreds of volunteer hours were saved. That, of course, is the siren song of these kinds of almost correct, or correct enough to fool an executive in a sales demo, systems. Do more for your organization while paying less people and/or paying the people left less money. It is an anti-labor device designed to let higher ups convince themselves that they don’t need people. Unfortunately for the Worldcon, it turns out that people are what drives the convention.
The people who run the Hugo awards — the Oscar equivalents for those genres — stepped away from their work, not wanting to be associated with the imitative AI disaster. People who were rejected for panels are, rightfully, demanding to be shown what the imitative AI tool said about them. Others re demanding refunds for their tickets and withdrawing from panels. Turns out you do, in fact, need people. Shame it took this level of embarrassment to remind the people who the convention of that simple fact.
Weekly Word Count
Zero.
Yeah, yeah, I know. How can I ever be anything other than a failure if I don’t write? I have been stuck on the thriller plotting story, as I mentioned last week, but do have a plan to talk through some of the issues with the acquiring editor and hopefully get this back on track.
In the meantime, I have taken to heart some advice: “Sarcastic asshole is your voice — lean into that.” Working under the assumption that was not an insult, I am doing just that. I am working out a more satirical, sarcastic fantasy novel. It will likely suck more than usual — comedy of any type is incredibly difficult — but hopefully I will learn some things and come out with a bit more refined version of sarcastic asshole. Besides, I don’t think you can revere Terry Pratchett’s writing and not try at least one homage.
Have a great weekend, everyone.