#ChatGPT monetization | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

autisticandroids · 1 year ago

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i've been seeing ai takes that i actually agree with and have been saying for months get notes so i want to throw my hat into the ring.

so i think there are two main distinct problems with "ai," which exist kind of in opposition to each other. the first happens when ai is good at what it's supposed to do, and the second happens when it's bad at it.

the first is well-exemplified by ai visual art. now, there are a lot of arguments about the quality of ai visual art, about how it's soulless, or cliche, or whatever, and to those i say: do you think ai art is going to be replacing monet and picasso? do you think those pieces are going in museums? no. they are going to be replacing soulless dreck like corporate logos, the sprites for low-rent edugames, and book covers with that stupid cartoon art style made in canva. the kind of art that everyone thinks of as soulless and worthless anyway. the kind of art that keeps people with art degrees actually employed.

this is a problem of automation. while ai art certainly has its flaws and failings, the main issue with it is that it's good enough to replace crap art that no one does by choice. which is a problem of capitalism. in a society where people don't have to sell their labor to survive, machines performing labor more efficiently so humans don't have to is a boon! this is i think more obviously true for, like, manufacturing than for art - nobody wants to be the guy putting eyelets in shoes all day, and everybody needs shoes, whereas a lot of people want to draw their whole lives, and nobody needs visual art (not the way they need shoes) - but i think that it's still true that in a perfect world, ai art would be a net boon, because giving people without the skill to actually draw the ability to visualize the things they see inside their head is... good? wider access to beauty and the ability to create it is good? it's not necessary, it's not vital, but it is cool. the issue is that we live in a society where that also takes food out of people's mouths.

but the second problem is the much scarier one, imo, and it's what happens when ai is bad. in the current discourse, that's exemplified by chatgpt and other large language models. as much hand-wringing as there has been about chatgpt replacing writers, it's much worse at imitating human-written text than, say, midjourney is at imitating human-made art. it can imitate style well, which means that it can successfully replace text that has no meaningful semantic content - cover letters, online ads, clickbait articles, the kind of stuff that says nothing and exists to exist. but because it can't evaluate what's true, or even keep straight what it said thirty seconds ago, it can't meaningfully replace a human writer. it will honestly probably never be able to unless they change how they train it, because the way LLMs work is so antithetical to how language and writing actually works.

the issue is that people think it can. which means they use it to do stuff it's not equipped for. at best, what you end up with is a lot of very poorly written children's books selling on amazon for $3. this is a shitty scam, but is mostly harmless. the behind the bastards episode on this has a pretty solid description of what that looks like right now, although they also do a lot of pretty pointless fearmongering about the death of art and the death of media literacy and saving the children. (incidentally, the "comics" described demonstrate the ways in which ai art has the same weaknesses as ai text - both are incapable of consistency or narrative. it's just that visual art doesn't necessarily need those things to be useful as art, and text (often) does). like, overall, the existence of these kids book scams are bad? but they're a gnat bite.

to find the worst case scenario of LLM misuse, you don't even have to leave the amazon kindle section. you don't even have to stop looking at scam books. all you have to do is change from looking at kids books to foraging guides. i'm not exaggerating when i say that in terms of texts whose factuality has direct consequences, foraging guides are up there with building safety regulations. if a foraging guide has incorrect information in it, people who use that foraging guide will die. that's all there is to it. there is no antidote to amanita phalloides poisoning, only supportive care, and even if you survive, you will need a liver transplant.

the problem here is that sometimes it's important for text to be factually accurate. openart isn't marketed as photographic software, and even though people do use it to lie, they have also been using photoshop to do that for decades, and before that it was scissors and paintbrushes. chatgpt and its ilk are sometimes marketed as fact-finding software, search engine assistants and writing assistants. and this is dangerous. because while people have been lying intentionally for decades, the level of misinformation potentially provided by chatgpt is unprecedented. and then there are people like the foraging book scammers who aren't lying on purpose, but rather not caring about the truth content of their output. obviously this happens in real life - the kids book scam i mentioned earlier is just an update of a non-ai scam involving ghostwriters - but it's much easier to pull off, and unlike lying for personal gain, which will always happen no matter how difficult it is, lying out of laziness is motivated by, well, the ease of the lie.* if it takes fifteen minutes and a chatgpt account to pump out fake foraging books for a quick buck, people will do it.

*also part of this is how easy it is to make things look like high effort professional content - people who are lying out of laziness often do it in ways that are obviously identifiable, and LLMs might make it easier to pass basic professionalism scans.

and honestly i don't think LLMs are the biggest problem that machine learning/ai creates here. while the ai foraging books are, well, really, really bad, most of the problem content generated by chatgpt is more on the level of scam children's books. the entire time that the internet has been shitting itself about ai art and LLM's i've been pulling my hair out about the kinds of priorities people have, because corporations have been using ai to sort the resumes of job applicants for years, and it turns out the ai is racist. there are all sorts of ways machine learning algorithms have been integrated into daily life over the past decade: predictive policing, self-driving cars, and even the youtube algorithm. and all of these are much more dangerous (in most cases) than chatgpt. it makes me insane that just because ai art and LLMs happen to touch on things that most internet users are familiar with the working of, people are freaking out about it because it's the death of art or whatever, when they should have been freaking out about the robot telling the cops to kick people's faces in.

(not to mention the environmental impact of all this crap.)

#ai art #ai #chatgpt

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lynzine · 5 months ago

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NaNoWriMo Alternatives

If you know what's happening (and has happened last year with NaNo) I want to offer some alternatives that people are working on to keep the event while ditching the organization.

@novella-november

I may reblog this post as I learn more but there are two right off the bat!

If you don't know why I feel the need to advocate for alternatives I will be getting into the second issue (not the triggering scandal last year) below the break.

(Long story short: On top of last year's scandal... they now have an AI sponsor. Which is a big red flag for me and feels like they are looking for content to train their AIs on as well as new consumers. What better place than thousands of unpublished novelists working on completing a novel in a month?)

(PS If you reblog... I don't need details of last year's scandal... please.)

Hi everyone, if you've been with me for a while you might know I'm a fan fo NaNoWriMo... The event, no longer the organization. I was wary... but willing to see how new policies and restructuring shook out after the major scandal last year (if you aren't aware, I won't be going into the details here, but you may find them triggering).

It's this second issue that I feel that I can actually speak on... Because NaNoWriMo has a new sponsor... and that sponsor is AI.

When I first heard that NaNo was okay with AI, I was wary but... not too upset. After all, NaNo's big thing for a long time was just "Just write" basically however you had too, whatever tools you need. I know that there are AIs designed to aid with grammar and clarity. And that seemed... if not fine, than understandable. NaNo (for me) is a major source of motivation and I could completely understand why NaNo wouldn't want wins invalidated because they used some kind of AI to help them along. Then I found out that NaNo picked up an AI sponsor and that completely changed the story for me. It went from the people NaNo served... to supporting one of the organizations that might be ripping off writers.

As I've said in the notes of my fics when I reluctantly took steps to protect my work from AIs like ChatGPT, putting my work in an AI is essentially monetizing my work without reimbursing me and other writers and undercutting jobs in writing that people like me truly want. I don't know what this sponsor's actual AI is like. But it is a massive red flag that they are sponsoring an organization that's focused on an event that generates thousands of potential books to train their AI on.

NaNo's official stance is "We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege." NaNo is experiencing a lot of backlash.

I will be hoping that one of the alternatives are up and running come November.

#NaNoWriMo #NaNoWriMo Alternatives #NaNoWriMo Problems #Writing Month

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sk1fanfiction · 2 months ago

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stop trying to monetize fic i'm literally as serious as a myocardial infarction

Okay so not only have I had to deal with the Artstation scammers constantly messaging me since October, to the point where my blocklist on FFN is 100 users long and I've had to block people on AO3 for the very first time, but today I got a review from someone asking if they can use my fic as content on their doubtlessly monetized Youtube channel (there are several of these accounts that send near-identical messages!), with a grating AI-generated voice reading the fic and stock or AI-generated footage playing behind it. I guess at least they are not trying to get me to pay them and are polite enough but this is quite literally I.L.L.E.G.A.L. if they are getting any AdSense money!

Illegality and swindling aside, not every hobby has to become a hustle and even though my writing might not be high art, that doesn't mean it deserves to be turned into soulless slop just because ChatGPT and Midjourney bros on Twitter who couldn't even write a fucking for loop gave you the bright idea. And I am personally sick of the recent deluge of scammers, trolls, and bots. What is happening to the moderation of both FFN and AO3?

Lastly, this has genuinely ruined reviews/comments for me. Every time I get a notification these days, I'm thinking 'please be a real person, please be real' because a full 50-60% of the time it's some auto-generated, mass-mailed message that has nothing to do with the fic. Hell I would even take a 'u suck' comment over this crap.

EDIT: I just remembered that the FFN app already has a reader built-in with a pretty natural-sounding voice, which is much higher quality than any of these channels, which makes them even more useless!

Okay, rant over. As you were.

#sk1 rambles #sk1 whines #fanfiction #fanfic #fanwork #fandom wank #fanfic review #fanfic comments #the rise of slop content #monetization hell #fic interaction is so low these days and we get THIS on top of it?!

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ruttotohtori · 4 months ago

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Analysoimamme sivuston sisältö toistaa äärioikeistolaista sanomaa ja salaliittoteorioita. Se myös kannustaa suoraan toimintaan. Tällä hetkellä suurin osa meillä leviävistä salaliittoteorioista nousee äärioikeistolaisesta tai konservatiivisesta maaperästä, kertoo suomalaista disinformaatiokenttää tutkiva viestinnän asiantuntija Janne Riiheläinen. – Suomessa tällä hetkellä hirveän monet ajatukset, narratiivit sekä salaliittoteoriat ovat peräisin Yhdysvaltain kulttuurisodista. Riiheläisen mukaan tekoälytyökalujen ansiosta kuka tahansa voi tuottaa laadullisesti ja määrällisesti yhä enemmän disinformaatiota.

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– Videolla voidaan saada kuka tahansa sanomaan mitä tahansa kenen tahansa äänellä. Kuka vain voi tehdä juridisen kuuloisen tiedotteen mistä tahansa pähkähullusta asiasta. Riiheläisen mukaan meillä ei enää kohta ole tapoja todentaa tietoa muodon kautta. Tietoon pitää syventyä ennen kuin näemme, onko se luotettavaa vai ei.

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Toimittaja-tietokirjailija Johanna Vehkoo kirjoittaa vuonna 2019 ilmestyneessä Valheenpaljastajan käsikirjassaan, että pitkään ajateltiin, että salaliittoteorioita ja disinformaatiota levittävät ihmiset, joilta puuttuu yhteiskunnallista valtaa. Viime vuosina asetelma on kääntynyt lähes päinvastaiseksi – salaliittoteoriat ja disinformaatio leviävät nykyisin myös yhteiskunnan huipulta, kuten poliitikoilta, julkkiksilta ja sosiaalisen median vaikuttajilta.

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Generatiivisen tekoälyn käyttö oikeistoradikaalin disinformaation tuotannossa ei ole uusi ilmiö. Sitä on nähty tänä vuonna käytettävän esimerkiksi Southportin mellakoiden lietsomiseen, vaalivaikuttamiseen EU-vaaleissa ja Yhdysvaltain sisäpolitikan manipulointiin. Meemien muodossa disinformaatiota on esimerkiksi Elon Muskin omistaman X-alustan Grok-kuvageneraattorilla.

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Kaupalliset kielimallit tarjoavat terroristiryhmittymille pomminteko-ohjeita, tietoa yhteiskunnallisen infrastruktuurin haavoittuvuuspisteistä sekä kirjoittavat käskystä sivukaupalla antisemitististä vihapuhetta. Kuva- ja äänigeneraattoreita puolestaan käytetään deepfake-videoiden sekä äärioikeistolaisten meemien luomiseen.

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Johanna Vehkoon mukaan osa tutkijoista kutsuu suuria kielimalleja, etenkin ChatGPT:tä, ”paskapuhegeneraattoreiksi”, koska ne eivät tiedä, mikä on fakta. Ne voivat keksiä vakuuttavan näköisiä lähdeviitteitä, joita ei ole olemassa. Lisäksi ChatGPT voi keksiä olemattomia journalistisia artikkeleita ja tapahtumia. – Monet ihmiset käyttävät näitä tiedonhakuun. Se on hirvittävän pelottava kehityskulku faktantarkistuksen ja journalismin näkökulmasta, Vehkoo sanoo.

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Suuret kielimallit on ohjelmoitu antamaan vastauksia kaikenlaisissa tilanteissa ja kuulostamaan vakuuttavilta, vaikka oikeasti ne eivät tiedä, mitä tieto on. Ongelmaa on lähes mahdoton poistaa, sillä se on sisäänrakennettu tekoälymalleihin. Lisäksi estoja voi kiertää.

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Hyvä kohde henkilökohtaistetulle disinformaatioviestinnälle ovat esimerkiksi salaliittoteorioihin kallellaan olevat sosiaalisen median vaikuttajat, joiden kautta viesti leviää suurelle määrälle seuraajia.

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Sisällöntuottajiin kohdistettu propagandakampanja nähtiin jo tänä vuonna, kun yhdysvaltalaiset oikeistolaiset vaikuttajat Tim Pool, Dave Rubin ja Benny Johnson levittivät Venäjän valtion sponsoroiman propagandakampanjan disinformaatiota, jossa käytettiin myös generatiivista tekoälyä.

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#yle

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chappydev · 1 month ago

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Future of LLMs (or, "AI", as it is improperly called)

Posted a thread on bluesky and wanted to share it and expand on it here. I'm tangentially connected to the industry as someone who has worked in game dev, but I know people who work at more enterprise focused companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. I'm a developer who is highly AI-critical, but I'm also aware of where it stands in the tech world and thus I think I can share my perspective. I am by no means an expert, mind you, so take it all with a grain of salt, but I think that since so many creatives and artists are on this platform, it would be of interest here. Or maybe I'm just rambling, idk.

LLM art models ("AI art") will eventually crash and burn. Even if they win their legal battles (which if they do win, it will only be at great cost), AI art is a bad word almost universally. Even more than that, the business model hemmoraghes money. Every time someone generates art, the company loses money -- it's a very high energy process, and there's simply no way to monetize it without charging like a thousand dollars per generation. It's environmentally awful, but it's also expensive, and the sheer cost will mean they won't last without somehow bringing energy costs down. Maybe this could be doable if they weren't also being sued from every angle, but they just don't have infinite money.

Companies that are investing in "ai research" to find a use for LLMs in their company will, after years of research, come up with nothing. They will blame their devs and lay them off. The devs, worth noting, aren't necessarily to blame. I know an AI developer at meta (LLM, really, because again AI is not real), and the morale of that team is at an all time low. Their entire job is explaining patiently to product managers that no, what you're asking for isn't possible, nothing you want me to make can exist, we do not need to pivot to LLMs. The product managers tell them to try anyway. They write an LLM. It is unable to do what was asked for. "Hm let's try again" the product manager says. This cannot go on forever, not even for Meta. Worst part is, the dev who was more or less trying to fight against this will get the blame, while the product manager moves on to the next thing. Think like how NFTs suddenly disappeared, but then every company moved to AI. It will be annoying and people will lose jobs, but not the people responsible.

ChatGPT will probably go away as something public facing as the OpenAI foundation continues to be mismanaged. However, while ChatGPT as something people use to like, write scripts and stuff, will become less frequent as the public facing chatGPT becomes unmaintainable, internal chatGPT based LLMs will continue to exist.

This is the only sort of LLM that actually has any real practical use case. Basically, companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Meta etc license an AI company's model, usually ChatGPT.They are given more or less a version of ChatGPT they can then customize and train on their own internal data. These internal LLMs are then used by developers and others to assist with work. Not in the "write this for me" kind of way but in the "Find me this data" kind of way, or asking it how a piece of code works. "How does X software that Oracle makes do Y function, take me to that function" and things like that. Also asking it to write SQL queries and RegExes. Everyone I talk to who uses these intrernal LLMs talks about how that's like, the biggest thign they ask it to do, lol.

This still has some ethical problems. It's bad for the enivronment, but it's not being done in some datacenter in god knows where and vampiring off of a power grid -- it's running on the existing servers of these companies. Their power costs will go up, contributing to global warming, but it's profitable and actually useful, so companies won't care and only do token things like carbon credits or whatever. Still, it will be less of an impact than now, so there's something. As for training on internal data, I personally don't find this unethical, not in the same way as training off of external data. Training a language model to understand a C++ project and then asking it for help with that project is not quite the same thing as asking a bot that has scanned all of GitHub against the consent of developers and asking it to write an entire project for me, you know? It will still sometimes hallucinate and give bad results, but nowhere near as badly as the massive, public bots do since it's so specialized.

The only one I'm actually unsure and worried about is voice acting models, aka AI voices. It gets far less pushback than AI art (it should get more, but it's not as caustic to a brand as AI art is. I have seen people willing to overlook an AI voice in a youtube video, but will have negative feelings on AI art), as the public is less educated on voice acting as a profession. This has all the same ethical problems that AI art has, but I do not know if it has the same legal problems. It seems legally unclear who owns a voice when they voice act for a company; obviously, if a third party trains on your voice from a product you worked on, that company can sue them, but can you directly? If you own the work, then yes, you definitely can, but if you did a role for Disney and Disney then trains off of that... this is morally horrible, but legally, without stricter laws and contracts, they can get away with it.

In short, AI art does not make money outside of venture capital so it will not last forever. ChatGPT's main income source is selling specialized LLMs to companies, so the public facing ChatGPT is mostly like, a showcase product. As OpenAI the company continues to deathspiral, I see the company shutting down, and new companies (with some of the same people) popping up and pivoting to exclusively catering to enterprises as an enterprise solution. LLM models will become like, idk, SQL servers or whatever. Something the general public doesn't interact with directly but is everywhere in the industry. This will still have environmental implications, but LLMs are actually good at this, and the data theft problem disappears in most cases.

Again, this is just my general feeling, based on things I've heard from people in enterprise software or working on LLMs (often not because they signed up for it, but because the company is pivoting to it so i guess I write shitty LLMs now). I think artists will eventually be safe from AI but only after immense damages, I think writers will be similarly safe, but I'm worried for voice acting.

#ai critical #ai is theft #llm #technology #chatgpt

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itmeblog · 2 months ago

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I've been thinking a lot about ChatGPT lately and how humans are really good at finding patterns to the point that we find them in places they dont exist. Like the phenomenon where anything abstract has the possibility of being interpreted as a face.

Anyway, we see what machines do and matter in -> black box -> matter out. And like for programs and printers and automated systems and shit that can be fine for working knowledge. Like someone out there knows precisely how the self checkout works but all I need to know is that the scanner works and that it accepts debit.

But we conflate that with our existence. People are not machines. The point of writing a Great Gatsby essay in high school wasn't because the essay mattered. The end result wasn't the point. The point was the black box. The synthesis, the analyzing text and interpretation of quotes that taught you stuff like media analysis and checked reading comprehension. Everything that happened from the time you got the rubric to the final submission of that paper mattered. The essay itself is like... vaguely consequential. There are hundreds of thousands of not millions of Great Gatsby essays, nobody was clammoring for more, particularly not 9th grade English teachers.

The point is the black box, the point is the *doing*. And you see we do that weird optimization everywhere, it's not even new! AI just made a new dimension. Make dinner faster, monetize your hobbies, write this quicker, lose weight at mach 1, don't you want Alexa to read bedtime stories to your kid!?

I know it's all capitalism and whatever in a trenchcoat but sometimes it really has me wondering, what am I alive for? And the answer so often is "the black box".

Like doing silly voices while reading to make my family laugh or pouring over a dictionary while writing or smelling onions caramelize. Stories From Ylelmore in and of itself is a middle finger to story optimization omg, how many convos in there are so strictly unnecessary to the plot?? Because in Ylelmore the plot doesn't matter! The point is making the journey as fun as possible!! Having a stupid 5 minutes argument about whether fish drown? Sure, why not?! We have the time!!

Just a few years ago I used to lament having to *sleep* and all the productivity I was missing out on! And why? For what? What was there to be productive about?

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puraiuddo · 1 year ago

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So by popular demand here is my own post about

and why

This case will not affect fanwork.

The actual legal complaint that was filed in court can be found here and I implore people to actually read it, as opposed to taking some rando's word on it (yes, me, I'm some rando).

The Introductory Statement (just pages 2-3) shouldn't require being fluent in legalese and it provides a fairly straightforward summary of what the case is aiming to accomplish, why, and how.

That said, I understand that for the majority of people 90% of the complaint is basically incomprehensible, so please give me some leeway as I try to condense 4 years of school and a 47 page legal document into a tumblr post.

To abbreviate to the extreme, page 46 (paragraph 341, part d) lays out exactly what the plaintiffs are attempting to turn into law:

"An injunction [legal ruling] prohibiting Defendants [AI] from infringing Plaintiffs' [named authors] and class members' [any published authors] copyrights, including without limitation enjoining [prohibiting] Defendants from using Plaintiff's and class members' copyrighted works in "training" Defendant's large language models without express authorization."

That's it. That's all.

This case is not even attempting to alter the definition of "derivative work" and nothing in the language of the argument suggests that it would inadvertently change the legal treatment of "derivative work" going forward.

I see a lot of people throwing around the term "precedent" in a frenzy, assuming that because a case touches on a particular topic (eg “derivative work” aka fanart, fanfiction, etc) somehow it automatically and irrevocably alters the legal standing of that thing going forward.

That’s not how it works.

What's important to understand about the legal definition of "precedent" vs the common understanding of the term is that in law any case can simultaneously follow and establish precedent. Because no two cases are wholly the same due to the diversity of human experience, some elements of a case can reference established law (follow precedent), while other elements of a case can tread entirely new ground (establish precedent).

The plaintiffs in this case are attempting to establish precedent that anything AI creates going forward must be classified as "derivative work", specifically because they are already content with the existing precedent that defines and limits "derivative work".

The legal limitations of "derivative work", such as those dictating that only once it is monetized are its creators fair game to be sued, are the only reason the authors can* bring this to court and seek damages.

*this is called the "grounds" for a lawsuit. You can't sue someone just because you don't like what they're doing. You have to prove you are suffering "damages". This is why fanworks are tentatively "safe"—it's basically impossible to prove that Ebony Dark'ness Dementia is depriving the original creator of any income when she's providing her fanfic for free. On top of that, it's not worth the author’s time or money to attempt to sue Ebony when there's nothing for the author to monetarily gain from a broke nerd.

Pertaining to how AI/ChatGPT is "damaging" authors when Ebony isn't and how much of an unconscionable difference there is between the potential profits up for grabs between the two:

Page 9 (paragraphs 65-68) detail how OpenAI/ChatGPT started off as a non-profit in 2015, but then switched to for-profit in 2019 and is now valued at $29 Billion.

Pages 19-41 ("Plaintiff-Specific Allegations") detail how each named author in the lawsuit has been harmed and pages 15-19 ("GPT-N's and ChatGPT’s Harm to Authors") outline all the other ways that AI is putting thousands and thousands of other authors out of business by flooding the markets with cheap commissions and books.

The only ethically debatable portion of this case is the implications of expanding what qualifies as "derivative work".

However, this case seems pretty solidly aimed at Artificial Intelligence, with very little opportunity for the case to establish precedent that could be used against humans down the line. The language of the case is very thorough in detailing how the specific mechanics of AI means that it copies* copywritten material and how those mechanics specifically mean that anything it produces should be classified as "derivative work" (by virtue of there being no way to prove that everything it produces is not a direct product of it having illegally obtained and used** copywritten material).

*per section "General Factual Allegations" (pgs 7-8), the lawsuit argues that AI uses buzzwords ("train" "learn" "intelligence") to try to muddy how AI works, but in reality it all boils down to AI just "copying" (y'all can disagree with this if you want, I'm just telling you what the lawsuit says)

**I see a lot of people saying that it's not copyright infringement if you're not the one who literally scanned the book and uploaded it to the web—this isn't true. Once you "possess" (and downloading counts) copywritten material through illegal means, you are breaking the law. And AI must first download content in order to train its algorithm, even if it dumps the original content nano-seconds later. So, effectively, AI cannot interact with copywritten material in any capacity, by virtue of how it interacts with content, without infringing.

Now that you know your fanworks are safe, I'll provide my own hot take 🔥:

Even if—even if—this lawsuit put fanworks in jeopardy... I'd still be all for it!

Why? Because if no one can make a living organically creating anything and it leads to all book, TV, and movie markets being entirely flooded with a bunch of progressively more soulless and reductive AI garbage, what the hell are you even going to be making fanworks of?

But, no, actually because the dangers of AI weaseling its way into every crevice of society with impunity is orders of magnitude more dangerous and detrimental to literal human life than fanwork being harder to access.

Note to anyone who chooses to interact with this post in any capacity: Just be civil!

#fanfiction #ao3 #fanart #copyright law #copyright #chatgpt #openai #openai lawsuit #chatgpt lawsuit #author's guild #author's guild lawsuit #george rr martin #george rr martin lawsuit #copyright infringement #purs essays #purs post #purs discourse

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transmascpetewentz · 5 months ago

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i would've been such a good web 2.0 youtuber. before the platform became sponsor and monetized hell. i could've been older jan misali but now it's impossible to compete with people who make 1 video per day by making chatgpt write their scripts and ai edit their videos and the videos are shit but are barely passable as something that isn't total slop and they add 5 billion ads and sponsorships to it, and it gets millions of views because they put out a video every day. it's very demoralizing to be a person with thoughts and opinions on web 3.0

#wentz.txt

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vasilinaorlova · 1 month ago

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Excerpt from My Novel Inconsolable Narrative

I continue being blown away by Chat GPT editing skills. Let me show you an excerpt from my novel (that I currently call Inconsolable Narrative, which is also the title of my many-year blog on Tumblr). The novel is very raw and needs endless revising, but, because the draft is also a lot of pages, and they keep multiplying as I keep editing. I might never finish revising my novel. And, therefore, I am not under any serious obligation to keep the text to myself up the point when I polish it, amirite (which will likely never come)?

The content of the post below:

1. The excerpt from my novel (pages 247-251 in my current file); 2. ChatGPT summary; 3. Improvements that ChatGPT suggests (that painstakingly resemble my own instructions to myself written earlier ("show don't tell") and also my human research advisor (Craig loved to write "segue!" in pencil on the margins of raw pages that I kept bringing him--he taught me so much!).

Share my admiration of ChatGPT--the best reader and critic that we hoped we would have and finally do have, a product of human genius.

1. My Excerpt

Nevertheless, even our surface-level conversations with my therapist ease my inner tensions a little bit. I go for walks twice a day. Zilker Park of Austin is the fanciest place. Zilker always reminded me of Hyde Park. Like Barton Springs, Zilker also looks like a series of French impressionist paintings: Monet, Renoir, Degas, Sezan, Cézanne. From impressionists, Zilker Park derived colorful shadows and well-dressed citizens in summer attire. Zilker Park reminds me of Gorky Park in Moscow, too. The picnics, the weddings, the sunbathers, the kayakers, pedestrians in towels and hats: they all speak to me about the nuclear sunrise, a beautiful day, a utopian nowhere—whatever it all means, I could barely know myself—but walking Zilker Park in the COVID-19 pandemic is an exercise of suffocation for me (yet again).

The park is full of people wearing no masks and seemingly taking no pandemic precautions, except for when they observe what is now called “social distancing”—being on a distance of six feet or more from others. Six feet is a distance that is considered safe. Speaking to people, indeed interacting with them in any way, for me, is impossible, as if an invisible wall divides me from them, or, rather, me from them. Apparently, the invisible walls exist only around me; the walls do not divide them from each other. I wonder what it is that divides me from others, exactly? Is it my strangeness? Emigration? Pandemic? My selective social mutism? Still, seeing people walking, talking, playing with their dogs, or sitting in shadows on grass is refreshing. And one of the dogs—a red doggo with amber eyes—sticks her wet nose into the palms of strangers, and briefly, into my palms, too, as if accepting me into the circle of the living. A fleeting multispecies encounter amounts to an experience of socialization—or communication—for the day. I am within a system of traces of my previous walks. I created labyrinths of walking in Austin, even though in the straightforward plannings of the American cities, no labyrinths are possible. Streets and avenues cross each other at a ninety degrees angles. Not much of a labyrinth is possible to create in a grid of such streets. I recollect my friend Alexey from a long time ago, who once described a fox in the zoo to me. The fox in the zoo created an elaborate maze for itself, a system of entrances and exits in a tiny space of its cage. The fox did not have any space but managed to create an elaborate maze of the den.

The sense of being separated from others as if from the glass is familiar from the reflections of other immigrants. I wonder if my otherness is the reason I feel like I am isolated from others. What if otherness is more so of a divide than the regime of self-isolation in the pandemic? I wonder if I am to feel the same self-isolation in Russia. When I am old, I might return, I am thinking. (The full-blown war has not yet begun; pandemic is still unfolding). I think about becoming older. Imagine that I am not going to age in a retirement home. Provided I am lucky, and my son would care about me enough to place me in a retirement home. Or, if I am in Russia, Russia has state-sponsored retirement homes with very modest style of living. I am assuming people do not live there for a very long time; not with those budgets. I will return to Russia. I will be wiping the floor with a big dirty cloth, while grumbling non-stop, “They walk and walk and walk here” [“Khodiat tut vsiakie”]. If you see an old woman mopping the floor and grumbling at everybody who passes he, know that this is me.

The days were peppered with the usual annoyances and awkward interactions with others. Oleg picked envelopes from the post box. He frequently went to check the post box. He had a habit of checking the post, almost a compulsion. Oleg’s stopping to check the box whenever we went anywhere for a walk annoyed me. He went to collect the mail far more often than was necessary. He dealt with the pandemic in his own way. I waited for Oleg for several minutes. A bunch of Texas cowboy boots and shoes were scattered near the door at the first floor. Somebody took their stuff out to air or something. I took a picture as the boots were scattered beautifully, I thought; I enjoyed the composition—or maybe I was so utterly bored by the repeated walks in the flourishing Austin that a bunch of shoes of the neighbors looked like an event in the middle of the day.

A man of about thirty, the neighbor, opened the door and told me that he was about to clean the passage. He will remove those shoes. I was ashamed of photographing the shoes and him evidently thinking that I was going to complain to a landlord about the shoes. I assured him as best I could that having the shoes there was okay and I simply liked the composition. I avoided to mention the landlord, to be precise, a landlady. The landlady, we speculated, lived in one of the apartments of the apartment complex. She had a penchant of tending to flowers—or so we assumed—we definitely assumed her gender on the basis of her having lavish flowers—and I was mortified that the neighbor thought that I might send her photo of his boots scattered in front of the door in a picturesque composition. Some boots had brown and blue elements and copper buckles shining in the sun.

I wished intently to be able to tend to the plants. However, I was not blessed with the green finger. After the Arctic Freeze that hit Texas, Kostia and I walked around and picked a broken prickly pear cactus on the street. Plenty of cactus leaves were scattered after the weather inclemency, but we picked the leaf that had a few chances of survival. The cactus leaf lay on the road. Already someone stepped on the leaf and broke it. The leaf lay like a bird with a broken wing. Kostia and I planted the cactus leaf in a pot. Kostia named our cactus Prickly the Pear.

We put our cactus outside on the balcony, and I began calling the balcony “a front garden.” I added the detail that I am a gardener to one of my submissions of poems. When Oleg learned about it, he said I cannot call myself a gardener because I did not have a garden and barely had any plants. Oleg said that being a gardener was a class marker. We did not belong to the class that had gardens. I could not call myself a gardener, was Oleg’s verdict. I got angry and asked him what he cared if I called myself a gardener. Perhaps I enjoyed inhabiting the identity of a gardener, even if only for a poetry submission. Maybe I wanted to try new roles.

I was reading sitting at Torchy’s taco bar next to the new Austin library. Joanne Rowling famously wrote Harry Potter in a café. I can only read in noisy places—and I do not have a fascinating story to tell children, or even adults. A chain of construction workers was exiting the construction site. Above, over the workers’ heads, a notice shone, “Entrance for Builders of Great Things,” doubled in Spanish: “Entrada de Constructores de Cosas Grandiosas.” In Spanish, the phrase sounded even more impressive. One of the builders semi-danced semi-stumbled, as if a rap melody sounded in his helmet or beyond. Others had stickers—naked slender women—on their lunchboxes. I recalled that in a Moscow restaurant, in the kitchen where I got access to as a photographer, a collage of a naked woman hanged on a fridge. The main cook rubbed her genitalia are with his finger, seeking to entertain me and my friend, who was writing about the restaurant for a magazine.

Looking at the construction workers, I thought about bodies trafficked like goods and money, all around the infrastructure of a growing U.S. city, the infrastructure of which I am a part--an idle notch—I toyed with the idea of people as infrastructure, famously by AbdouMalique Simone. “We wrecked our brains trying to make this thought into a question,” as Kathleen Stewart wrote, not word-to-word, in her last book about somebody else’s idea. My dissertation defense date was fast approaching. I decided to apply my pen to documenting how approaching the dissertation defense date felt. Something was waiting to take turn and take form. A red dog was being walked on a leash. A boy at the near table shouted that he hates eyedrops that his caring parents already prepared for him and were getting ready to administer. Ping pong players, hill climbers, the fun-havers on the swing—all of the world was spinning, resolutely before my defense date. Was I going to be told something scathing about my work?

The overwhelming feeling was of being bored to death but also anxious. I have not known such anguish, or maybe I did. I am on top of the world, but I do not feel like I am. I downloaded a mindfulness app that told me “be with what is” and “lean into it.” Things accrued but did not bring consolation. Looking back, I know I was not about to embark on a professorship and was not on top of the world. But I assumed I would, of course, as most of us did. Graduate students know no humility.

I began playing tennis, but tennis did not make me less lonely. I watched white American women bond quickly at the expense of my exclusion—perhaps my accent contributed, and, I am sure, other marks of otherness that I did not notice. I was not aware of those signs, but I knew signs were present. The green court was like a heated pan in Texas heat. Women wore beautiful tennis attire: short white skirts, white sports shirts. White fabric looked great against tanned skin. Women were blonde and brunette. Women were like Barbies from my Soviet childhood: unattainable. I never had a Barbie, but I had a pink journal about Barbie dolls. Somehow in the 1980s, the journal sifted through the porous curtain, no longer iron. My partners in tennis were like coming from the pages of the journals. White teeth, pink lips, and big eyes. I was not even trying to strike any sort of conversation with them that would last beyond the green tennis court.

I am going to proceed with my novel. I would not have any critique about it from anyone, and I should not care about how little of my novel survives. Every sentence is an achievement. Even the danger of my novel slipping into journaling should not stop me. I am in a café that survived the heights of pandemic. I am drinking cappuccino from a cup with the motto “Festina Lente” (“Make Haste Slowly”). There are five tables here, all occupied, one by me. A man is talking on the phone mentioning “cases” and having “taken two of them.” Girls, each of whom is probably doing yoga, sit across each other in Buddha Maitreya poses, their small purses on the table. (I keep my purse on the table too). I visited a dermatologist earlier today, and she said, use sunscreen every day. Do not even think about not wearing sunscreen. I am becoming unsettlingly aware that I am not wearing sunscreen. One of the yoga girls has a medium-size medium-fluff dog that calmly sits in shadow. It is getting warmer in Texas now, not to say, hotter. The second man at the café stares at his phone. He purchased a cake, apparently, hence a brown bag lies on his table. The third man appears the most restless. He fidgets—he could not sit straight for several minutes. He was able to concentrate only after he rearranged his possessions several times. I am reading Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant’s book. There are words that jump out onto me when other words do not. Today, these words are “a little life for a little while” (2009, 27).

2. ChatGPT summary - a lot of fun to read, for me, very boring to you, even more boring than reading my excerpt. Yet you're still reading it, I don't know why. Perhaps you do not have anything better to read.

The passage reflects the author's inner thoughts and feelings about their life during the COVID-19 pandemic, their isolation, and their observations of life in Austin, Texas. The author describes their walks in Zilker Park, comparing it to artistic landscapes and other parks, such as Gorky Park in Moscow. Despite the park's vibrancy, the author feels a sense of separation from others, both due to the pandemic and possibly their immigrant status, contemplating what divides them from others.

The author also shares personal anecdotes, like their relationship with their friend Oleg, who repeatedly checks the mail, and their discomfort when a neighbor mistakes their interest in a photo of scattered cowboy boots as a complaint. They also reflect on a cactus they rescued and planted, and the identity of a gardener, which Oleg challenges.

The narrative weaves through these moments of mundane yet meaningful observations, such as the author's interactions with construction workers and their feelings of exclusion in social situations, like when playing tennis. They also express a sense of inner conflict and anxiety as their dissertation defense approaches and as they grapple with their sense of identity and belonging in a foreign culture.

Despite this, the author finds solace in small, fleeting moments of connection, such as a brief encounter with a dog, and continues to focus on their novel, finding it an achievement in itself. There is a recurring theme of being caught between a sense of displacement, the ongoing pandemic, and personal reflection, while navigating the complexities of their life in a new cultural environment.

3. ChatGPT's answer to the question "How do I improve this excerpt?" - wow, just look at the suggested examples, like "the awkwardness is thickening between us," damn girl! You know how to write, despite that some of these turn of phrases are sure a bit generic. I will think about what to steal.

To improve the excerpt, consider focusing on the following areas:

1. Clarity and Conciseness: Some sentences are long and dense, making it harder to follow the narrative. Breaking up complex thoughts into shorter, clearer sentences could enhance readability. Eliminate unnecessary words that don’t add to the meaning or emotional impact.

2. Consistency of Tone and Structure: The excerpt alternates between deep philosophical reflection, personal anecdotes, and descriptions. To maintain a more cohesive narrative, try aligning these sections in a smoother transition. For instance, when moving from a reflection on the pandemic to a personal anecdote (like the cactus planting), provide a more seamless connection to guide the reader.

3. Show, Don’t Tell: In several instances, the author "tells" the reader how they feel ("I am isolated from others"), but there’s an opportunity to "show" those emotions through imagery, actions, or dialogue. For example, instead of simply saying the park is a place of isolation, describe a specific moment where the author observes others connecting, but feels disconnected.

4. Tightening Imagery and Metaphors: The passage is rich in imagery, but some metaphors (e.g., "labyrinths of walking") can be sharpened for more impact. Consider making these comparisons more vivid or directly relevant to the theme of isolation or connection.

5. Flow Between Paragraphs: The shifts between different reflections can feel abrupt. Using transitions between different themes or moments—like the shift from the cactus anecdote to the tennis scene—could make the flow more natural. Reflecting on the implications of each thought or moment before jumping to the next can enhance the overall structure.

Here’s an example of an edited portion:

Original: "The park is full of people wearing no masks and seemingly taking no pandemic precautions, except for when they observe what is now called 'social distancing'—being on a distance of six feet or more from others. Six feet is a distance that is considered safe. Speaking to people, indeed interacting with them in any way, for me, is impossible, as if an invisible wall divides me from them, or, rather, me from them."

Revised: "The park is filled with people who have abandoned masks, the usual pandemic precautions seemingly forgotten. Only the six-foot rule remains, a thin buffer of safety. For me, though, the distance feels greater—like an invisible wall that isolates me from everyone. I watch others interact, but I can’t seem to break through that invisible barrier."

This revision tightens the sentences, improves clarity, and emphasizes the emotional isolation more directly.

6. Dialogues and Interactions: Dialogue can add dynamism and give more insight into the author’s character and relationships. The brief exchange with the neighbor about the boots can be expanded to reveal more about the author's internal state or feelings of awkwardness. It can also deepen the reader’s understanding of the social dynamics the author is navigating.

Original: "I was ashamed of photographing the shoes and him evidently thinking that I was going to complain to a landlord about the shoes."

Revised: "As I snapped the photo of the scattered boots, I felt a wave of shame. My neighbor watched me warily, likely assuming I’d report him to the landlord. I hurriedly reassured him, avoiding any mention of the landlady, the awkwardness thickening between us."

This revision adds emotional nuance and clarifies the feeling of discomfort in the situation.

7. Pacing: Ensure the pacing matches the tone and atmosphere. The moments of deep reflection or self-questioning could be given more time to breathe, while mundane descriptions (like the tennis scene or Oleg checking the mail) could be tightened to avoid dragging.

By focusing on these areas—clarifying ideas, improving transitions, tightening descriptions, and ensuring consistent tone—you can create a more impactful and engaging excerpt.

___ Not bad at all, right?

#novel #prose #Chat GPT #editing #writing

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