The Plot Bunny Farm

I have many friends who use chatbots or other plagiarism-engine apps, so I try not to be a dick about how much I dislike it. But I don't want to hide how much I dislike it, either. I call the stuff "plagiarism engines", as a shorthand, but if I am honest, it's not just the plagiarism that I hate. It's not just that it's setting fire to the planet, or that it's driving up electricity and electronics costs, or that it produces such bad-to-mediocre pap, or that it's making real artists and real authors have to defend their work as Not AI, either.

I hate the idea itself: the notion that you can strip away all human skill and effort from the act of creation. Just press a button, and voila, the thing you wanted now exists. I hate it. You can tell I've always hated the idea, because when I make a setting that has magic, it's never magic that makes art without effort. In Silver Scales, enchanters can make beautiful, interactive, three-dimensional illusions -- but they need skill and training and artistry to do so. A character with tons of magical power but no training in art can make copies and do simple/crude images, but nothing like what artists can do. It's similar in all my settings, because I do not write about dystopian hellscapes, and a world where artistry is meaningless is a dystopian hellscape to me.

You could train an LLM on only public-domain works, and make it run for years on a single AA battery, and have it generate stories that make the heart leap with joy and wonder, and I would hate it just as much. I do not want machines that make art.

I do not want machines that make human creativity irrelevant. There is no ethical way to do that because that is not an ethical thing to do.