Tag: AI

Weekly Update – May 23, 2023

On By ronsonbeckIn Novels, Strongarm & LightfootLeave a comment

A funny thing happened on Twitter last week.

Several writers I follow were posting about some new software called Sudowrite, an AI writing program that promises the world, as these products often do, to aspiring authors. What I learned is, Sudowrite invited writers to submit their unpublished (therefore not really well-protected by copyrights) manuscripts, and they’d receive auto-generated blurbs, loglines, and outlines of their work for use when pitching to agents and publishers.

Sounds cool, doesn’t it? My least favorite part of submitting queries was trying to summarize my work. Writing synopses is excruciating, and I know a LOT of writers who’d gladly hand that dreary job over to software.

Here’s the “however” part…

The company used those submissions to train an AI writing engine, which it is now pitching to aspiring authors as a “writing tool” — which is a marketing-friendly way as saying, “This AI software will write the story for you, you lazy, talentless hack.”

And as usual, there were legions of people defending Sudowrite — many of them clearly bot accounts, but we won’t look too closely at that perverse irony — and that’s the kind of thing that REALLY pisses me off. People love their entertainment, they need it, but the thought of the act of artistic creation being somehow hoarded by a small, elite group (i.e., people who spent literally years of their lives honing their craft) angers them to no end, and they take pleasure, actual pleasure, in seeing professional creatives taken down a peg, sometimes to the point of losing their livelihood. So I fired off this tweet:

I post stuff on Twitter regularly, and sometimes my posts get a surprising amount of traction, but this one took off hard. Not only has the tweet itself been liked a few thousand (!!!) times, I’ve gained about 30 new followers in the span of three days. This is definitely unusual for me; I normally gain one follower a week, and half the time it’s a bot account.

A couple of follow-up tweets, also nothing particularly deep or insightful, garnered even more attention. I’m honestly impressed and flattered, but also baffled that a couple of B-grade tweets blasted off in the heat of the moment have earned more attention than some of my much more thoughtful writing-related posts. But then, Twitter does seem to be a big rage engine, so maybe this all makes sense in context.

Anyway, the whole episode struck me as funny. Not ha-ha funny, I mean.

WRITING PROJECTS

The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot – Draconian Measures: First draft complete.

APPEARANCES & EVENTS

  • None scheduled

MISC.

If you’d like to make sure you don’t miss any news from me, remember that I have a newsletter that features some of the stuff you see posted here plus new, newsletter-exclusive material. Click this link to sign up.

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Weekly Update – May 9, 2023

On By ronsonbeckIn Business of writing, Novels, Strongarm & LightfootLeave a comment

So, about the Writers Guild of America strike…

Long story short, it’s totally justified and I support it.

Below I’ve posted the most recent list of the WGA’s demands, and the studios’ responses to them, so dive it if you want to, but the gist is, writers want more money and greater job security. They’re not getting as big a cut of streaming revenues as they feel they deserve, and they want safeguards in place to stop studios from using AI writing programs to do the work instead of talented, skilled humans in order to save money.

Now, take a look at the dollar figure at the bottom of page two. If the WGA got everything it wanted, the cost to Hollywood would be $429 million per year. The Hollywood film industry recorded revenue of — depending on your source — between $5.99 billion (yes, Billon with a Capital B) and $7.37 billion, and that is just the domestic box office take. Add in global box office and now we’re in the realm of $26 (+/-) billion. Hollywood’s total global film and TV market is worth $267.61 billion (2022).

The WGA’s demands equal .07 percent of the lowest figure cited above.

Hollywood can easily afford the WGA’s wish list.

They can also afford to provide writers with job security by A: not reducing them to gig workers, and B: not using AI — which, frankly, can’t write to save its artificial life, certainly not in the way Hollywood needs it to write. Scripts are not simply created, passed on to the production team, and never touched again. They are frequently rewritten on the fly, on set, and AI can’t adapt to that kind of environment. Don’t take my word for it, go read this thread by Sera Gamble (The Magicians, Supernatural) about what an on-set writer does during any given production.

And I’m not going to dive down the rabbit hole of AI as a substitute for human talent, but I am going to give a hearty “fuck all the way off” to anyone who dismisses the importance of human writers and advocates for AI to take over, especially if their argument involves anything along the lines of “writers are overpaid” (they bloody well are not) and “anyone can write” (no they bloody well cannot).

If you enjoy movies or TV at all, you should be behind this strike. You should be supporting the writers. You should not be playing cheerleader for a multi-billion-dollar industry trying to screw over hard-working, skilled, talented artists whose contributions to visual media are the literal foundation for everything. Every movie, every TV show begins with the writers. Without them, you have nothing to build on.

WRITING PROJECTS

The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot – Draconian Measures: First draft underway.

APPEARANCES & EVENTS

  • None scheduled

MISC.

If you’d like to make sure you don’t miss any news from me, remember that I have a newsletter that features some of the stuff you see posted here plus new, newsletter-exclusive material. Click this link to sign up.