The book opens on an eleven-year-old boy sitting on a tree stump at the bottom of a garden, watching a beetle climb a blade of grass and deciding it has a clearer sense of direction than most people he knows.
"When a book wears its inspiration this openly, does a voice this good earn the borrowing, or should a debut have to build its own house from the ground up?"
People are a lot more forgiving of these things if the story's good. Harry Potter wasn't original either, but it was good enough that people don't mind.
This isn't just "not original"; it was written by AI based on a few prompts. Is that what we're going to reward now? Harry Potter was a riff; this is the Temu version of that.
IDK if it was written using AI, I care whether it's a well-told tale. Given that 90% of human writers churn out slop worse than AI slop... well, you get the picture.
Of course it was. If you don't like AI, you'd better stick to print editions. More than 50 percent of all the music on Spotify is AI. It won't be long before it's the majority of ebooks on KU and audiobooks on Audible, if it's not already.
And it doesn't bother you, that human creative expression is now outsourced to computer brains, largely with your help? Or are you one of those people who counts coming up with a backstory and some character archetypes as "human creative expression"? Do you see a qualitative difference between the actual painting of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and a copy of it? Is sex with a woman no better or worse, as a concept in action, than sex with a robot?
Do you judge everything by results only, or does the process matter to you? Wisdom, understanding, prescience, ethics and morality; these things are as much about the process as they are the results. By cutting the process off from the person, you deprive a thing of its real beauty -- which is not just in the eye of the beholder; that's so-called "Enlightenment" nonsense -- and make everything manufactured. You would turn all of storytelling and artistic expression into cheap Dollar Store knockoffs, soulless McMansions of a gutted culture. *You* become the cultural colonizer; *you* become the thief who kidnapped art and then murdered it.
And you're risking all this in service of what? To "own the libs"? Look, I don't want the socialist left to control the message anymore either, but this isn't the way to stop them. AI as the solution is like winning every war with nukes. Eventually there's nothing left for the victor to celebrate. You're not empowering the people any more than communism did, trying to force equality. And you're a fool if you think AI work will be "just one option amongst many"; over time it'll be the only option, and the people you're trying to stop now will end up in control of it anyway.
Look, AI is a productivity enhancer - that's *all* it is. If I get really in the zone when writing, I can get maybe 10k - 11k words down in a single day, and I write better than Claude et al. But with Claude, I can do five or ten times that. I can get a novel-length story done in a week; heck, I've done one in a single *day* in the past.
The situation is akin to the early days of the Industrial Revolution: sure, the artisan may be able to make a better table or chair, but the furniture factory can crank them out cheaply enough and quickly enough that many more people can actually (a) afford them, and (b) buy them. And frankly, the furniture factory's products are better than what 90% of the artisans can make.
As for "depriving the thing of its real beauty", most people don't give a toss, and that's even assuming that they can tell the difference.
Finally, one of the benefits of AI is that it's allowed the creation of works that would *never* have been produced otherwise. Vox Day's work on Veriphysics and evolution wouldn't have occurred without AI there to crunch the numbers, to do the research, to test the results, and all that. The Agrippan Trilemma was solved thanks to AI. The critical amphiboly in Kant's philosophy was found thanks to AI. Evolution mathematically disproved thanks to AI. A robust, practical philosophical system far superior to Enlightenment thinking was developed and fleshed out thanks to AI.
1. You don't understand the creative process. AI does nothing without an anchor. The creative spark is called a spark because it is very small. Most of what is done does not require it, but nothing can be done without it.
2. Only the result matters. There is no beauty in the process, the intention, or the motivation, only the result. All of those cheap knockoffs and soulless McMansions were done by humans. You're focused on the wrong target.
3. Better results. Thanks to AI, I solved a problem that has puzzled Mankind for 2,000 years. AI couldn't do it alone. I couldn't do it alone either. But by augmenting my own intelligence, the impossible became achievable. I estimate that if one uses AI properly - which is NOT how most people do - one can achieve an effective 2SD boost to one's native intelligence.
You don't understand either the things you are defending or the thing you are attacking.
"When a book wears its inspiration this openly, does a voice this good earn the borrowing, or should a debut have to build its own house from the ground up?"
People are a lot more forgiving of these things if the story's good. Harry Potter wasn't original either, but it was good enough that people don't mind.
This isn't just "not original"; it was written by AI based on a few prompts. Is that what we're going to reward now? Harry Potter was a riff; this is the Temu version of that.
I read it. It's much better than Harry Potter TBH.
That's not how AI-writing works, Rex. You have no idea what you're talking about.
IDK if it was written using AI, I care whether it's a well-told tale. Given that 90% of human writers churn out slop worse than AI slop... well, you get the picture.
And was any of it written by AI?
Of course it was. If you don't like AI, you'd better stick to print editions. More than 50 percent of all the music on Spotify is AI. It won't be long before it's the majority of ebooks on KU and audiobooks on Audible, if it's not already.
And it doesn't bother you, that human creative expression is now outsourced to computer brains, largely with your help? Or are you one of those people who counts coming up with a backstory and some character archetypes as "human creative expression"? Do you see a qualitative difference between the actual painting of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and a copy of it? Is sex with a woman no better or worse, as a concept in action, than sex with a robot?
Do you judge everything by results only, or does the process matter to you? Wisdom, understanding, prescience, ethics and morality; these things are as much about the process as they are the results. By cutting the process off from the person, you deprive a thing of its real beauty -- which is not just in the eye of the beholder; that's so-called "Enlightenment" nonsense -- and make everything manufactured. You would turn all of storytelling and artistic expression into cheap Dollar Store knockoffs, soulless McMansions of a gutted culture. *You* become the cultural colonizer; *you* become the thief who kidnapped art and then murdered it.
And you're risking all this in service of what? To "own the libs"? Look, I don't want the socialist left to control the message anymore either, but this isn't the way to stop them. AI as the solution is like winning every war with nukes. Eventually there's nothing left for the victor to celebrate. You're not empowering the people any more than communism did, trying to force equality. And you're a fool if you think AI work will be "just one option amongst many"; over time it'll be the only option, and the people you're trying to stop now will end up in control of it anyway.
What the heck, I'll bite.
Look, AI is a productivity enhancer - that's *all* it is. If I get really in the zone when writing, I can get maybe 10k - 11k words down in a single day, and I write better than Claude et al. But with Claude, I can do five or ten times that. I can get a novel-length story done in a week; heck, I've done one in a single *day* in the past.
The situation is akin to the early days of the Industrial Revolution: sure, the artisan may be able to make a better table or chair, but the furniture factory can crank them out cheaply enough and quickly enough that many more people can actually (a) afford them, and (b) buy them. And frankly, the furniture factory's products are better than what 90% of the artisans can make.
As for "depriving the thing of its real beauty", most people don't give a toss, and that's even assuming that they can tell the difference.
Finally, one of the benefits of AI is that it's allowed the creation of works that would *never* have been produced otherwise. Vox Day's work on Veriphysics and evolution wouldn't have occurred without AI there to crunch the numbers, to do the research, to test the results, and all that. The Agrippan Trilemma was solved thanks to AI. The critical amphiboly in Kant's philosophy was found thanks to AI. Evolution mathematically disproved thanks to AI. A robust, practical philosophical system far superior to Enlightenment thinking was developed and fleshed out thanks to AI.
Exactly. Rex, like most people, has no understanding of what has already been done with AI, much less what is now possible as it improves.
1. You don't understand the creative process. AI does nothing without an anchor. The creative spark is called a spark because it is very small. Most of what is done does not require it, but nothing can be done without it.
2. Only the result matters. There is no beauty in the process, the intention, or the motivation, only the result. All of those cheap knockoffs and soulless McMansions were done by humans. You're focused on the wrong target.
3. Better results. Thanks to AI, I solved a problem that has puzzled Mankind for 2,000 years. AI couldn't do it alone. I couldn't do it alone either. But by augmenting my own intelligence, the impossible became achievable. I estimate that if one uses AI properly - which is NOT how most people do - one can achieve an effective 2SD boost to one's native intelligence.
You don't understand either the things you are defending or the thing you are attacking.