By: A.B. Timothy
The other day, I responded to one of Ryan Williamson’s articles about AI. He was gracious enough to respond to my response in an article of his own. In that article, he talked a lot about the need for transparency and how the issue was not the use of A.I. alone, but rather the lack of transparency. Below I have written my reply to his reply.
Raising the Flag of Truce
Hey Ryan,
Another great article. It is clear from your work that you are so very well written and—I would have to assume—read in this area. You have written several articles (just referring to the ones you mentioned in your post, not including the ones I don’t know about, of which there are undoubtedly many) on the issue of A.I. in creative works, and you have a breadth of personal experience with this technology. I ultimately agree on many of your takes and am willing to let bygones be bygones on the points we still don’t see eye-to-eye on. I have no plans to “boycott” anything you write, as you have assured me (and I take your word as your honor) that all of the actual meat of your work is human.
There are some things I wanted to bring up for further discussion, however:
You brought up, several times, the need for complete transparency in literature, and I have to wonder, what does that mean for Pen Names? I myself write under a pen name, though I do not hide behind anonymity, using my real face as my public profile picture, linking my real name public X account to my author X account via a post I made almost a month ago. I just do not feel the need to tell each individual about my “real” life. Similarly, I would not lie if someone asked me about my use of AI or Grok, but I don’t feel the need to announce it. This plays into your points about ghost writing and my use of A.I. as a marketing advisor.
On Ghost Writing…
There is a marked difference between using A.I. to write your prose as opposed to hiring a human ghost writer. A.I. is trained on millions of words of other authors’ work, and in many cases, this data has been taken without the permission or payment given to the original authors. A human ghost writer, however, while likely also having been trained on millions of words of other authors material, is using their human faculties to correlate and process that data after, in most cases, they have consumed that data through ethical and reasonable means.
I do not like your idea that this argument is on the same level as “throw away your computer because it was made with blood-cobalt.” That offense, of these foreign nations profiting off of slave or inhumanly-paid labor, is much, much worse than someone reading a pirated book. But if you look at the markets right now, who is demanding the most of those inhumanely collected resources? It’s not the public market, it’s not you or me, it’s A.I. companies. So, continued use of A.I. and support given to these companies is a double sin in this comparison.
Thus, here too, I bring you the offer of a draw, I don’t lecture you about using A.I. you don’t lecture me about typing on blood-cobalt (which also powers your A.I. data-centers).
Arguably, a human ghost writer avoids a number of these issues as it is (in most cases) an adult human being paid for the art they have chosen to create and give up rights to.
On A.I. Marketing
While I understand that A.I. in all forms of art will continue to improve year over year, this attitude that you seem to have of just throwing up our hands and saying, “It will only get better,” is one I cannot agree to. To simply watch the age of men die and do nothing as it burns repulses me. I understand, as you said in your article, you do not view this struggle as poetic or spiritual as I do, and that’s okay; not everyone has to see everything the same way.
A.I. art has gotten good. I won’t sit here and claim it hasn’t because that would be a lie, even the book cover you use in your original post is a great example of A.I. art that can fool the masses and even impress the informed. However, I need to ask, would you have bought that book if you knew the artist went to such lengths to lie about having created that image themselves? You might answer yes, and that’s your choice, but morally (again, I understand morality has little to do with the marketing game as it’s played today, as you pointed out), I couldn’t stand by it. Now, would I go through the hassle of trying to return the book and get a refund if I had already bought it under false pretenses? No. I’ll be honest and say it would not be worth that much of a hassle for me.
Marketing materials as a whole? Go nuts, man. I can’t stop you, and I probably will end up using some of them myself (for the free things.) I think that is where I draw the line. You drew the line at the end product must be a creation of the credited author, SPOT ON! But, I would further that line by saying: the end product is whatever the consumer spent their money on. If I am selling stickers at a booth alongside my book at a con, I would want those stickers to have art drawn and created by paid artists. If part of my marketing is my book cover (which it has to be), I would insist that the art featured there on, must be from a paid human artist.
The prose within the pages of the book goes without saying.
But, free things, like marketing posts on Social Media, blurb art for my blog (See the placeholder art for The Shards of Arthur’s Shield over on my Novels page). Things that cost the consumer no money to see and might only help push people towards my artist-produced work, yeah I don’t mind using A.I. for that.
At the end of the day, I think you said it best when you said “[A.I. Marketing Materials and Human Art] are [both] legitimate business decisions.”
A Final Olive Branch
Here is my idea, and something that people could start working towards in politics:
Art, broadly, already has the Copyright Protection Act to help protect it against theft and redistribution. What if human art had a similar thing? What if there were a Human Art Act, an act of government meant to protect human artists and to help push them? It could put coal at the feet of Social Media companies to start cracking down on art that does not meet a certain threshold of humanity, and could force them to cut down on the artificial slop. Now you made a great point in your article that KDP already had an overwhelming amount of human slop thrown at it year-round, but that is, in my opinion, no reason to just open the flood gates and let loose the A.I. hoardes.
This idea of protecting human art (which would not be perfectly air-tight just as the CPA is not), is something that I would like to imagine we could agree on. The only issue I could see you having with this is the reversing of some of the democratization of marketing you talked about in your article.
This last thing was just something cool I’ve thought of and would love to get your thoughts on it as an A.I. Professional.
Farewell
Thank you for the great dialogue and your very thorough response to my response to your response. I wish you well and pray for the health of your loved ones,
A.B. Timothy, Author
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