Good and insightful article. Let me comment on the disclosing of digital writings, because disclosing of printed writing, I guess, is much more difficult to deal with.
Disclosing is certainly a personal decision, that probably not all the writers will do, despite of the regulations. I´m thinking on an automatic and secure encrypted disclosing of authorship embedded in the digital media, that can not be changed later. So if a writing is authored by an AI, the authorship should remain securily in the digital media. A new standard to encode and protect the metadata embeded in the digital creation is required (Perhaps using NFT?). (And also protect the copy & paste as some document and word procesors already does).
Of course a writer can later edit the digital writing but the authorship must remain to the AI and the editor appear as such. On the other side if a writer indeed write a digital writing , the NFT will endorse he/she is really the author. The same could apply to all digital created media. (Its just an idea that came up to my mind). Would that work?. Very probably the technology industry and the regulation institutions will come up with a clever solution. In the mean time... , you are right, this matter is an ethical choice of the writer.
I get this and I do think this is imperative for Journalism. But fiction may be a whole other thing.
Ofcourse, its cool to say this publicly, "I'll always disclose if AI is involved in my writing", but seriously, who gives a damn, if it isn't journalistic writing. For novels and fiction, i couldn't care less what is involved in creating the story. If its a magic pen that wrote -how much? 20% 59% All of it?- the thing, who cares. If it was written by your dog, the only ones interested are cheap clickbait sites who want an article about a writing dog. I care about: Does the story grab me by the balls? Does it speak to me? Is it gripping? Is it interesting? Does it speak to me? Does it swing? Do I like the tone of voice? Does it challenge my views? Is it elegant? Whats the structue, wheres the climax, in short: Does it work? Can I fall into it, can I immerse myself in the writing? Who cares if you used a typewriter or a language model based on sophisticated statistics or a Faber pen. All I care about: Can you put words in a sequence that speaks to me?
And I'm not done yet: Disclosing usage of AI, at least at this point in history, may break the spell and a story that would've spoken to you suddenly doesn't, because you associate it with a robot voice. But its not a robot: Behind the language model stand 1 billion trillion words written by people and you, the curator of AI-chosen words, still put those words into a sequence, you still curate and arrange the output so that it works.
We are far away from a GPT3 that can just spit out The Great Gatsby and until we are not there, it may be counterproductive for the purpose of a story to disclose AI-involvement. But hey it sounds good on Twitter, amirite?
(As I said, I do think journalism is another, uhm, story. I want to know who made the mistake, a human or a machine, and who may be to blame for inaccuracies. Journalism needs transparency, storytelling does not.)
(And yet another story are experimental, explicit machine artworks. But they work *because* of the knowledge of AI-involvement, not *despite* of it.)
LLM probably -- almost certainly -- would do a better job for most of what I personally need Substack for, which is making it easy to follow developments in various fields, because the LLM has such a richer input. And of course the subscription rates would be more like $10/year than $50. I wonder when this will happen -- when humans will be driven out of "field-following" journalism. End of the decade?
Good and insightful article. Let me comment on the disclosing of digital writings, because disclosing of printed writing, I guess, is much more difficult to deal with.
Disclosing is certainly a personal decision, that probably not all the writers will do, despite of the regulations. I´m thinking on an automatic and secure encrypted disclosing of authorship embedded in the digital media, that can not be changed later. So if a writing is authored by an AI, the authorship should remain securily in the digital media. A new standard to encode and protect the metadata embeded in the digital creation is required (Perhaps using NFT?). (And also protect the copy & paste as some document and word procesors already does).
Of course a writer can later edit the digital writing but the authorship must remain to the AI and the editor appear as such. On the other side if a writer indeed write a digital writing , the NFT will endorse he/she is really the author. The same could apply to all digital created media. (Its just an idea that came up to my mind). Would that work?. Very probably the technology industry and the regulation institutions will come up with a clever solution. In the mean time... , you are right, this matter is an ethical choice of the writer.
I get this and I do think this is imperative for Journalism. But fiction may be a whole other thing.
Ofcourse, its cool to say this publicly, "I'll always disclose if AI is involved in my writing", but seriously, who gives a damn, if it isn't journalistic writing. For novels and fiction, i couldn't care less what is involved in creating the story. If its a magic pen that wrote -how much? 20% 59% All of it?- the thing, who cares. If it was written by your dog, the only ones interested are cheap clickbait sites who want an article about a writing dog. I care about: Does the story grab me by the balls? Does it speak to me? Is it gripping? Is it interesting? Does it speak to me? Does it swing? Do I like the tone of voice? Does it challenge my views? Is it elegant? Whats the structue, wheres the climax, in short: Does it work? Can I fall into it, can I immerse myself in the writing? Who cares if you used a typewriter or a language model based on sophisticated statistics or a Faber pen. All I care about: Can you put words in a sequence that speaks to me?
And I'm not done yet: Disclosing usage of AI, at least at this point in history, may break the spell and a story that would've spoken to you suddenly doesn't, because you associate it with a robot voice. But its not a robot: Behind the language model stand 1 billion trillion words written by people and you, the curator of AI-chosen words, still put those words into a sequence, you still curate and arrange the output so that it works.
We are far away from a GPT3 that can just spit out The Great Gatsby and until we are not there, it may be counterproductive for the purpose of a story to disclose AI-involvement. But hey it sounds good on Twitter, amirite?
(As I said, I do think journalism is another, uhm, story. I want to know who made the mistake, a human or a machine, and who may be to blame for inaccuracies. Journalism needs transparency, storytelling does not.)
(And yet another story are experimental, explicit machine artworks. But they work *because* of the knowledge of AI-involvement, not *despite* of it.)
Content Marketing is difficult but effective. It is worth looking into this topic. I recently read this interesting post on the subject: https://gamerseo.com/blog/learn-the-best-strategies-for-content-marketing-for-startups/
I might have to buy credits to commission DALL-E 2 at this point to be my lead designer. Sad to admit.
LLM probably -- almost certainly -- would do a better job for most of what I personally need Substack for, which is making it easy to follow developments in various fields, because the LLM has such a richer input. And of course the subscription rates would be more like $10/year than $50. I wonder when this will happen -- when humans will be driven out of "field-following" journalism. End of the decade?
Can you say more about what you will covering/discussing in your Substack? And can you reply to hapgood@pobox.com?