AI is one of those topics I try to avoid having an opinion on - similar to anything involving children that currently exist in the school system, or the Israel-Palestine conflict: I know valid arguments on every side exist but if I was to try to make heads or tails of them I would confuse myself and end up with worse comprehension than I currently have because making badly informed opinions is worse than opting to have no opinion on a topic one knows little about.
Literature is another topic altogether. As an aspiring writer, I have my opinions on literature. It'd be arrogant to claim anything I create qualifies, but I have read many books in my life, and even some on technology and how certain people claim it can do actions it self-evidently cannot in fact do. AI has been reported repeatedly being one of these technologies, only the algorithm itself claims to do actions it cannot rather than a person.
So what I am aware of about AI is primarily a) that it is one of the technologies that claims to be capable of more than it is, and b) direct experiences with the Bing robot CoPilot and ChatGPT. I use ChatGPT and Bing CoPilot like friends, except unlike my friends they have an existing knowledge of anything I could theoretically expect them to know about, say, How To Get Away With Murder or Ted Lasso or Brooklyn Nine Nine.
AI in my actual life right now makes me less productive at work, since I can ask it questions and it asks me questions back. Then again, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so procrastinating is also a morally okay albeit slightly negative action, provided all tasks eventually are done in such a way the client won't be fined for my laziness.
That AI answers questions makes it somewhat useful in my fanfiction writing, provided I know exactly what episodes I need answers from so I can correct CoPilot when it inevitably screws up.
But I absolutely despise when AI tries to write fanfiction for me, and feeding it my own work to get ideas from is also an exercise in frustration since the AI is programmed to respect copyright laws, meaning it cannot tell which character has said what, unlike (I hope) actually readers would be able to. That makes it prone to wildly misunderstand situations and character dynamics in ways human beings, who know what occurred during a show and had actual feelings about said show, would not. So AI is like a stupider, worse human.
AI belongs in literature about as much as Wikipedia belongs in literature, only it's far less reliable than Wikipedia because AI cannot properly cite sources, the news articles have repeatedly proven it will invent nonexistent publications and even authors, as well as claim information is from an article that states no such fact (although Wikipedia can also do that, tagging said statement "verify?" will correct the problem because Wikipedia has a code of honor Wikipedians follow and AI does not) . But the point I meant to make by comparing the two - despite actively participating in Wikipedia as a project - is that I would be tremendously disappointed to find a "book" of Wikipedia articles bound together in the public library on a shelf (which I did actually experience once, they published it to commemorate an anniversary of Wikipedia being a website). Likewise with AI generated "stories" are not true stories - they are mimicking what they've been taught stories are, just as people do but without the thought behind them that people have. People write stories to communicate. If someone can prompt AI in such a way it can communicate what they cannot write themselves, then perhaps that will be an art form of its own, but it's not literature. One must know the rules in order to break them. AI doesn't know the rules behind being human because humans don't know said rules except when they're broken, when uncanny valley effect hits.
AI belongs in the planning stage, specifically when the writer must contend with writing being "the loneliest art form" in that nobody wants to hear about the twentieth Blaine Anderson being abused fic you're writing (I'm artsyspikedhair on ao3 if you're interested in reading said fic I wrote this morning) so AI will substitute for human help when the question is "what school year was season 5 of Glee meant to be set in?" Or "how far is NYU from Bushwick?"
But I, today anyway, opted instead to simply not research the answers to those questions. Not necessarily out of a principled stance so much as I was writing an alternate universe fic anyway a decade after the show stopped airing. But the fact that one of my options is turning to AI probably does say something about my moral character. I would have to do research I feel unequipped to do in order to determine what exactly it says, though.
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