AI in Creative Writing and Worldbuilding: Does It Really Matter?
Today’s entry may have a slightly more philosophical tone. Today, as on other occasions, I became aware of how that ridiculous and cancerous behavior is gradually spreading across more and more subreddits.
The fact that Reddit is a refuge for idiots does not mean there are no normal people there too, and as I said on another occasion, I want to believe that most people still are.
I follow and occasionally participate, using my personal profile, in various writing, worldbuilding, and roleplaying game subs. I also follow some of their alternative “with AI” versions, and today I realized precisely why. I already knew why, of course, but seeing it from the outside was very revealing.
Someone made a post saying that, because they had been accused of writing their worldbuilding summary with AI, they had moved to one of those other “with AI” subs to post their contribution there.
And do you know what happened?
Nothing.
Nothing strange.
People, apart from a few mentions of the incident, focused on the actual proposal. They talked about the setting. They offered ideas and alternatives.
In other words: normality.
And I wonder: isn’t this simpler? Isn’t it more reasonable? Why are some people so concerned about whether what you present was actually made entirely by you or somehow enhanced with an LLM? Why have some people decided that evaluating whether what another person wrote truly came from their brain and their fingers is more important than the subject being discussed?
Why do you care what other people do?
I have read about publishers rejecting manuscripts because they cannot guarantee that they were not written using AI. There are constant “accusations” of AI use, and once again I find myself wondering: why should anyone care what somebody else does with their novel or their worldbuilding?
And let nobody misunderstand me. This argument is not intended to clear the way towards the idea that using AI is necessarily justified, or that everybody should use it. No. This is simply a tangential reflection. I am not interested in judging it, and I do not care, because I believe that doing so has very little value or meaning.
As a writer, ever since people first began talking about using AI to write, the whole matter seemed profoundly irrelevant to me, because if other people use AI to write, it does not affect me.
I love storytelling, and I write because it makes me happy. I write because I enjoy it, and that is something nobody can take away from me. If there are people writing dozens of books with AI, that does not change my reality in any way.
So why should I care?
Because of some strange sense of creative purity that other people are failing to reproduce according to how I imagine and believe things ought to be done?
Who cares?
Why do these people care?
Is it ego?
Envy?
Do they feel some kind of strange comparative grievance because people using AI can do certain things better or faster than they can?
Is it because of this exotic and distorted idea of the creative purity of human beings?
But if AI is trained on human data, just as humans are trained on human data, then what it produces is profoundly human. In fact, it could hardly be otherwise.
As for Reddit, there are people who use AI, or defend its use for these kinds of tasks, and eventually get expelled from certain subs. Others are accused of using it even when they do not, and they end up dragged into arguments and reciprocal accusations when the original subject of discussion was something entirely different, perhaps a writing question, a request for worldbuilding advice, or something similar.
As a consequence, more and more alternative spaces are being created where the people affected by these practices gather in order to do exactly what they were doing in the original spaces: talk about creation, writing, ideas, advice, and so on.
If we all gradually stop entering spaces where discussion is constantly diverted towards AI and away from the actual interests of the people participating, then I suppose we will simply keep leaving those spaces behind, while the alternatives continue to grow in traffic and activity and the others slowly begin to wither.
When Windows 98 appeared, many people did not want to stop using Windows 95.
During the first few months in which the two systems coexisted, whether someone changed operating systems or not was irrelevant.
But in the end, it is simply a matter of time.
Something inexorable.
Forty years later, I suppose there are very few computers still running Windows 95.
