Content/Consent
Seanan McGuire
Polemic wrapped in a story
Content/Consent is Seanan McGuire's March 2023 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows:
This month we're stand-alone again (this year so far has been a gift to the folks who wanted more stand-alone stories, although I'm going to have to get back to following some continuity backstory stuff soon), as we examine another aspect of the current "AI" controversy.
Namely...what happens if these programs ever do become intelligent?
It's a short story (11 pages in PDF) about generative AI. Honestly, it is barely a story -- it is a polemic about AI wrapped in a thin story. The view presented here is that AI as we currently implemented, is nothing more than a complicated form of plagiarism of the artists whose work was used without their consent to train the AI.
This is certainly the view of most of the artists I run into who take the trouble to have an opinion about chatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc. And it's undoubtedly correct. Mostly. Nearly 100%. Some nuance is missing from McGuire's story. Art snobbery -- the view that artists are special people whose work cannot be compared to the work of people who are not artists, blinds one to certain less orthodox ideas about creativity. McGuire is not immune.
In fact, in my experience, scientists, mathematicians, software engineers, politicians, accountants, businessfolk, and handymen all feel that their work makes them special and allows them to be creative in ways that artists are not. And they are right! All of them! Even the software engineers who create AI engines!
It is useful to see the views of a professional artist on this subject. But since McGuire's views are pretty much the same as those of every other artist, and since they are (in my opinion) somewhat cloistered, I am not terribly excited about this story.