Does Nobody Remember What Happened on August 29th, 1997? by Patty Blount

 I have thoughts about AI. 

Lots of thoughts. 

Don't get me wrong, I like technology. I even have several computer degrees. But the debates currently raging about artificial intelligence raise some truly valid -- and disturbing -- points. 

Take the strikes happening in Hollywood right now.  

Suppose you're an actor no one's heard of. You get regular work but it's roles like "Guy in Restaurant" or "Woman on Street." You're paid what amounts to a couple of thousand dollars for hours or days of work. You have an agent to pay, so remember, this isn't a steady paycheck. It's for the time you spent allowing filmmakers to use your likeness. 

But here's where it gets horrifying. Those filmmakers who paid you a few thousand dollars have the technology to manipulate your recorded image. They can put you in different clothes, different poses, even have different words come out of your mouth. They can multiply you like pages stacking up in a printer tray so your single likeness can now fill a stadium to capacity -- and they don't have to pay you a dime. 

You'd be pretty ticked off, right? 

I sure would. 

That's just one way AI is diluting our worth. 

For authors, it's worse. We don't make a lot of money at this publishing game. Despite the success of people like Angie Thomas, Jason Reynolds, Veronica Roth, Stephanie Meyer, many authors earn pennies on each sale of their book. I work full time in addition to writing. It takes me months, if not years, to write a compelling story. 

Along comes AI and spits out a "novel" in seconds. 

But is it really a novel or is it just another way to manipulate a recorded image? AI is not intelliegent at all; it's simply fast -- super fast -- at collecting information from the internet. I played with ChapGPT and asked it write a review about Some Boys. You know what it did? 

It grabbed pieces from actual reviews of my novel and spit it out as one large review. That's all it can do. 

Ask it to write an entire novel and you'll get more of the same. It'll scour the internet for Words, More Words, and Look! Here are more Words! 

Some of them may even be good words. But it cannot ever truly "write" a novel. 

So -- AI as a tool to do some heavy lifting, like analyze lengthy texts for keywords? OK. But to expect art from it? Nope. 

And to expect writers to agree to contract clauses that don't protect our work from being captured by or used to teach AI? I want no part of that. 

Besides, eventually, all this AI is going to become self-aware. We all saw that movie, right?