#aipocalypse

My Samsung phone has a feature called "Adaptive Brightness". It's supposed to make staring at the screen for hours on end instead of doing something I actually like more comfortable, by automatically brightening up or dimming the screen depending on the environment. If I'm outside, it brightens, and if I'm in a shaded area, it dims.

I have always had this feature turned off, mainly because it never works as efficiently as I'd like it to. But after a full day outside, whenever I step inside my house, the screen dims itself exactly the way it's not supposed to while Adaptive Brightness is turned off.

“We promoted music for all the major record labels,” says Lim, 29, who lives in San Francisco. “We worked with a top-five celebrity I can’t name. We got 40 million views for an artist with just a hundred thousand followers.” Floodify’s services were in demand in politics, too.

Exploitation is defined as "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work." And that describes what AI does to a T.

The authors/artists/other creators whose work was scraped are exploited. They put in work, their time and effort, and often their very heart to make those works. And they are treated unfairly: they don't get credit, payment, exposure or any other form of compensation for their work being scraped and used by AI. More importantly, it is done against their will, with little to no recourse or opt-out options.

And the AI/its company benefits: they get points in their dataset and payments from both interested investors and premium users. In fact these creators unwillingly provide a vital service to the AI, with their collective works providing the very basis for how the AI works and generates things. All without being compensated or acknowledged.

Fuck their stupid fucking statement and I hope their legal chair gets booted from her post.

Listen, I don’t give a fuck about most of what’s on the archive. I’ve even read some of the fucked up shit there.

But I am not fine with my work sharing space with ChatGPT garbage.

And no, this isn’t me “gatekeeping writing”. Hell no. Start typing bucko because it’s easy as putting words down and as hard as regularly practicing. Like all skills. Lots of writers get their start writing fanfic, and many continue to write fanfic.

This is me being extremely aware of how a lot of people in tech and oh gee, folks like Network Producers, are gleefully using generative AI to not hire artists, and pay those they do hire to clean up the garbage less than their usual rate.

OTW and Ao3 was supposed to be on our side. The side of creative, the side of those who enjoyed this hobby. Yes, we have to explain on a yearly basis why fucked up fics are on the archive and why having lawyers on call is important. But it was for us.

Yet now, they’re trying to be neutral on an issue that deeply effects creatives and those in creative industries. They’re trying to pretend that it’s not big deal. Except for someone like myself whose ability to pay for housing whilst being disabled is dependent on there being creative wfh jobs, it really is a big deal.