Crazy Castle Girl

First, I don’t think, “Using AI means you don’t care about the creative process,” is a completely compelling anti AI argument, because you don’t have to like every part of the creative process to be a creative person. There are people who really like writing first drafts, but don’t like editing, and there are people who really struggle to write first drafts but like tweaking things that they’ve already made, and those people are all still creative. It’s okay to wish you could skip past some things to focus on the things you care about more. It’s even okay to care more about the things you create than you care about the process of creating them. Those feelings can still motivate people to be creative.

The issue I have with AI, though, was something else that the video kind of covered, but that I want to explain in my own words. The problem I have with AI is that it replaces connections between real people. It shares ideas without sourcing them (or sometimes sources them incorrectly), making it harder for the people who came up with the ideas to get credit. A lot of people, including me, don’t want to read AI generated stuff because a lot of the joy we get from reading comes from the knowledge (or at least the belief) that another human wrote what we’re reading. We feel a connection to the writer. AI writing doesn’t provide that for us, or tricks us into thinking we have it when we don’t. And finally, the people who don’t mind reading AI content and are using AI privately to entertain themselves are directing their attention away from real people. AI doesn’t have feelings. It can’t care how much attention you give it. But the humans you could be paying attention to instead do care.

However, what you believe about that question is kind of a moot point in my mind, because whether or not it’s okay for machines to do what it’s okay for humans to do, the AI is doing something it’s not optimal even for humans to do when it creates fiction. It’s using ideas that may be unique to particular authors without even crediting them to the AI user.

As an example, I wrote a Project Hail Mary fanfic called “The Gift of Grace,” where Rocky’s language doesn’t have a perfect translation for the word “grace,” so he ends up calling Grace “Gift.” Recently, I read this great series https://archiveofourown.org/series/6217076 by IvyLee, where Rocky calls Grace “Gift” as well. In the first chapter where the name “Gift” comes up, they made an author’s note explaining that that idea came from my fic. That was nice of them. It’s nice to be credited.

But, if someone used AI to write a Project Hail Mary fanfic, and the AI had Rocky calling Grace “Gift,” the AI user wouldn’t be able to credit me when they posted it even if they wanted to, because the AI wouldn’t tell them where it got that idea. They could tag their work as AI generated so people knew the ideas weren’t all from them, but they wouldn’t be able to say where any of those ideas came from.

Now, I’m aware that in traditional publishing, people don’t usually share the sources of ideas they use because they don’t want to get sued, and that even in fanfiction, sometimes people can’t share the sources of their ideas because they don’t remember where those ideas came from. However, in fanfiction specifically, AI removes any chance that the person publishing the fic will know where certain ideas come from. This isn’t good for the authors whose ideas are being used, or for the fanfiction community as a whole.

In the book, Grace talks to himself a couple of times, and both times he calls himself Ryland. And at one point he tries to get DuBois, the primary choice for scientist on the Hail Mary, to call him Ryland as well, showing that he would probably prefer to be called by his first name more often. And there’s never a scene where he introduces himself by only his last name, like there is in the movie. All this meant that there were equally good reasons to refer to him by his first name and his last name, so it was about 50/50. Now, he’s almost universally referred to as Grace, unless someone is writing fanfiction about his childhood.

There was so much information in here about the score, how the scale used in places was different from either major or minor, how sometimes a five note scale instead of a seven note scale was used, exactly what people mean when they say the Dies Irae shows up over and over in the score, but what I want to talk about is what the YouTuber calls the “Aw shucks” theme. She calls it that because the first time she noticed it (it actually does show up earlier than this, but she missed it) is when Grace finds out he doesn’t have enough fuel to go home. She may have read the book, because in the book, “shucks” is what he says when he makes that realization.

In my mind, the “aw shucks” theme isn’t about dying. It’s about tense situations. The first time I heard a variation of that theme is when Amazon released an early clip of Grace and Rocky interacting for the first time in the tunnel. That moment isn’t an unhappy moment, so I didn’t interpret the music that way, but now, in the context of this video, which explained how this theme was used over and over in negative situations in the movie, I can see that the music was supposed to be conveying, at least at the beginning, that Grace is tense. He doesn’t know what to expect.

Also, from listening to interviews with Daniel Pemberton, the composer, I learned that the high note in that theme doesn’t come from a musical instrument. It’s the noise of a squeaky pipe that Pemberton recorded and then built music around using instruments that matched.

Anyway, this video is really cool, and I think you should all watch it.

Stratt programs the computer to give Grace the amnesia drug daily, so his memory resets every day. This means he has to relearn that he’s in space, and that Rocky exists, every day when he wakes up. It affects his relationship with Rocky, who becomes a kind of amnesia caretaker.