Tag Archives: chatgpt

AI, Michael Caine and Mr. Potato Head, together again

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I mentioned on social media in the past couple of days that I got the biggest reaction I’ve ever received on LinkedIn after posting that i’d unfollowed a LinkedIn connection after seeing them post touting AI.

Now this isn’t unusual on LinkedIn, where a lot of people have some financial investment and a vested interest in seeing AI succeed.

I posted this:

Unfollowed and cut my connection with an AI user.

AI is a destructive force. It kills jobs, creativity and the environment, all for profits for billionaires who don’t care about any of us. And when the AI bubble bursts, the economy will suffer.

If you’re an AI user, go ahead and unfollow me and cut our connection. You might as well, because when I see you touting AI, I’ll do it.

This brought responses from people I actually know and some that I don’t, taking the approach of warning me that: I’ll never get ahead without AI – similar to Reese Witherspoon’s “don’t get left behind” warning to all her girlies out there – and that I’m already using AI but probably don’t know it and that I’ll be using it in the future because everybody will be.

My answer was more polite than “bullshit” but that was the gist of it.

Anyway, the whole thing was amusing and good for engagement and I’ll probably go to that well again, despite the dire warnings – all, without a doubt, from people who have something invested in AI or at least hope to make a buck in it – popularizing the notion that all of us who have been writing email, writing books, etc., for decades WITHOUT the assistance of AI have apparently lost the ability to do so unless we rely on the processes that are killing the environment and killing jobs just so some poor schmuck can imagine themself as an author or have a “girlfriend who won’t say no.” (See my recent post on the topic of the AI girlfriend.

Then this morning, Publisher’s Marketplace reported on an “AI voice company” that plans to release an audio version of “The Odyssey,” timed to coincide with the Christopher Nolan movie, that will be narrated by the AI version of Michael Caine’s voice.

I can guarantee you I will live the rest of my days without listenng to that.

Those of you who know I have an absurd sense of humor know that the final paragraph of the article was my favorite:

ElevenLabs primary business is creating synthetic AI voices and text-to-speech audiobooks. They have partnered with Spotify to produce audio for self-published authors, and digital distributor Bookwire. Their Iconic Marketplace allows brands to license famous voices for AI-created content, in partnership with the celebrity or estate. Currently available voices include Dr. Maya Angelou, Judy Garland, David Hasselhoff, Laurence Olivier, and Mr. Potato Head.

So I want to know, did the company license the AI rights to the voice of Don Rickles, who voiced Mr. Potato Head in the “Toy Story” movies? And if so, why not just say their available voices included “Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head?”

So your books have been pirated to train AI …

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As a writer, I find AI an intensely bad thing. Yeah, it’s momentarily distracting and amusing to be scrolling through social media and see what are obviously AI-generated images of a horrible, horrible person licking the feet of an equally horrible person, or even to see some fanboy’s imagining of what a Justice League movie would look like if it were made in the 1960s.

Then you realize that this is AI and valuable natural resources are being used to run servers that create these images. Not to mention that real, actual artists – and in the case of the written word, writers – could be put out of work by this.

I first had some foreboding realizations about the effect AI might have on my work a few months ago when I went looking for one of my pieces for CrimeReads, so I could post a link to it, and realized that Google AI had generated bullet points of my articles. Why would someone need to click through to CrimeReads when they could just read the AI interpretation of what the site’s writers had written?

I was aware that some writers were saying they believed entire books of theirs had been used for AI training.

I was concerned about that because I know a lot of writers. I thought no one would possibly pirate and upload my little true crime books. Who would need that?

Then, on March 20, the Atlantic published a story about the 2-million-plus books, articles and scientific papers that have been added to Library Genesis, or LibGen, which is what Wikipedia calls a “shadow library” of file-shared work, including work that is not available digitally.

One of my writer friends said a couple of her books were there. Another had 15 of her 19 books pirated on LibGen.

The Atlantic offered a real public service that allowed readers to search to see if their work, or the work of someone they know, was uploaded to LibGen for AI training.

Here’s a screen shot of my search results using the link in the Atlantic.

I found two of the four true crime books I co-wrote with Douglas Walker on there, using the Atlantic’s search engine.

I later found what purports to be LibGen’s own search portal and could not find these two books. Had they been taken down in the meantime? Was there some mistake? It seems hard to imagine that the Atlantic got that wrong. Based on that article, I saw dozens of writers, some of whom I know, posted that they had also found their books on the site.

It’s unclear what to think about what’s there and what’s not, but there’s no question that pirated work hurts writers and publishers who might not be able to sell copies of books if people can get them for free. Since shit flows downhill, that trickles down to harm for writers, that’s for sure.

We’re all still figuring this out. It’s been pretty clear for a while that AI-generated art and writing is bad for the planet – servers use a lot of water to cool to create AI – and bad for writers. I suspect it’s also bad for consumers, but then I was never one to snap up pirated books and art and have been pretty skeptical of that inclination.

Brave new world, hell. This seems like a very cowardly ploy.