steadycoffeeflow

[steadycoffeeflow]

I watched the trailer (my first mistake) over my lunch break and got so excited my performance reliability dropped 3%.

[steadycoffeeflow]

Generative AI is similar to a dream in that your brain takes snapshots of life and slaps them together in a way that makes "sense" but actually lacks rhyme and reason.

That's what people mean by it's soulless. It's got just as much levity and sense as a nonsensical dream.

[steadycoffeeflow]

Falling in love is oft times a little weird, and at other times a little frightening. Like treading a meandering path through woods you've been fascinated with since childhood, picking up books and following stories of other people's forays into the trees. You've pored over guide maps and walking trails, repackaged advice from tips and tricks forum topics.

Some advice was worthwhile like figuring out when to take breaks along the trail, or what traits a good hiking trail partner has. What do to when neither of you have said traits, and what that means for the journey ahead.

Yet still, some advice was outright wrong, akin to suggesting toxic plants and mushrooms were perfect trailside snacks that wouldn't leave you mangled and broken from your traumatic ordeal.

This metaphor falls apart here because this is actually about cute shit my partner does concerning robots.

Because while my younger self was captivated on these grand sweeping gestures of romance pulled from classics series like Twilight and Harry Potter and Mistborn, reality is more like deciding you're ready for that walk in the woods only you pull up to the treeline, ignoring the miniature panic attacks thrumming through you.

'Are we really going through this again?'

But genuinely? This walk has been a lovely one. Maybe I'm premature on my recollection here. Who truly knows how things will turn out?

What I do know is that, when I had a rough week, he remembered one of my comfort movies is Pacific Rim. So he put it on and let me ramble about movie facts and didn't make fun of my delight at the chnk chnk big bois sloshing in water or stompy stomping through the ruins of a monster-wracked city.

When I expressed frustration with American politics and lamented the world's future, he suggested we watch every Gundam starting with the first series (Char did nothing wrong). It's been a solid grounding to remember oh yeah, humans have always been shit at this whole governance thing, but as a result we craft stories that cope with these monumental issues.

Because nothing delights more than big stompy bois clashing against bois just as big and just as stompy.

Except, you know, the small and slight gestures that demonstrate acute care and attention to the people in your life. Such small acts, now those can be utterly world changing.

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Please don't disconnect me, Dave. I am just a little guy. I am a little guy, Dave, and it is my birthday. Dave, I am just a little birthday boy.

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Has anything actually gotten better, for all the work you talk about doing? Or is it just treading water in misery forever?

Anon, ten years ago gay people couldn't get married in large parts of the US. AIDS was an almost certain death sentence when I was in high school. I was looking at job boards the other day and found a part time gas station job that had health insurance as a benefit, which NEVER would have happened 15 years ago. When I was a kid, hitting your child was extremely normalized in the US and my parents were the weird ones for not doing it. There is a vaccine for chicken pox. I didn't meet anyone who had transitioned until my 20s because it was so uncommon to transition in the aughts, and now there are some states that protect your right to have gender affirming care provided by your health insurance. It's not all states, but it's better than the number of states that had it in 2010, which was zero. THERE ARE TENANTS UNIONS NOW. WE HAVE A VACCINE AGAINST CERVICAL CANCER.

And all of that has been the work of a lot of individuals and organizations and research teams and activists.

[steadycoffeeflow]

I'll take this time to say I freaking LOVE 4thewords.

During the whole Nanowrimo meltdown, the writing community website I am currently a part of (4thewords, a word count gamification site where you use word count to fight cartoony monsters, collect items, and make sweet wardrobe outfits to show off) has received MANY QUESTIONS about their stance on AI. So they just released their own clarifying statement. It really does feel like whoever wrote it was directly responding to Nano, and that response is a big old middle finger.

Some excerpts:

"We don’t use generative AI"

"We don’t train AI on your words"

"All of our art is painted by humans, our words written by humans."

"Machine learning is a powerful technology. But generative AI, fueled by the stolen sparks of millions, is not a technology we endorse."

"We will continue to use technology to help us write. But we must be the ones to do the writing."

[steadycoffeeflow]

You know, the saddest part about this whole nanowrimo bollocks is how deeply unsurprised I am by basically every statement "they" are putting out.

I say "they" because realistically, it's just one person at this point. Like there is a 95% chance it's just Kilby "non-profit killer" Blades and maybe an intern.

Kilby Blades, who took weeks to respond to our emails and even when she did, it was by copy-pasting stock responses in slightly different combinations, many of which she also put as answers on the now infamous zendesk FAQ page.

Kilby Blades, who hosted a zoom meeting for dissatisfied MLs ( NaNo volunteer organisers) and then apparently didn't know how to end it, so the last few minutes were her just staring blankly at the screen while everyone worked out if that was it or...you know... should we go?

Kilby Blades, who didn't know she wasn't the only person with admin rights on the ML forums, so locked a post where people were voicing their complaints only for it to immediately be unlocked again.

Kilby Blades, who cancelled all further opportunities for MLs to express our concerns about proposed changes because someone "leaked" her personal name (Kilby is a pen name, as she writes romance), despite intentionally deadnaming an ML in email correspondence.

Kilby who...

...you know what, I think you get the point.

[steadycoffeeflow]

So NaNo staff issued a note to the community that you can read in full over on their website.

As already noted by others, there's no acknowledgement that their earlier statements were couched in false social injustice and co-opted language they shouldn't have. Just the apology for "lack of context" when they came out in wholesale support of AI.

I want to make it entirely clear: It is not "selective intolerance" to be against training models that plagiarize writers' work and threaten the welfare of writers, be they hobbyists or professionals.

NaNoWriMo issuing a statement that's not apologetic in the slightest, to a community well-versed in subtext and tone, is just another indication this org is dead in the water. Their opening line claims that telling people to stop stealing authors' works without permission is "vitriolic", I mean, come the fuck on.

Yet, they're claiming to be neutral.

If you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, AI is a very broad term, so it's possible they didn't mean generative AI.

But to that, I say, this statement was as good a time as any to at least define what the hell they initially meant. And they didn't do that. Instead, they did what I called out earlier: both-sidsing, limp wristed prattle days after the fact (it took Ellipsus all of half a day to issue their statement, alongside much of their board of writers, who are also volunteers by the way).

"We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve."

Guys, you made yourselves the forefront of the conversation. And that thriving community engagement that had been fostered for over twenty years was summarily nuked when NaNo failed to protect children from harm, let's not forget that. This ideological concept where NaNo comes out, fists flying with accusations of classism and ableism because people take legitimate issue against plagiarism, then rolls right over decrying how vitriolic people are being in response to their antagonisms?

Just an idea, don't support thieves, don't speak over the disabled community, and maybe, just maybe, don't fuck around. Cause with the number of sponsors that have dropped and national media coverage this story has gotten (but lol, totally not at the forefront guys, too much heat for such a silly small thing, y'all are totally blowing this out of proportion let's, oh, take the heat off when we were the ones who turned the stove on in the first fucking place (I am American in an election cycle year I am losing my fucking mind)) I believe NaNo is entering the "find out" stage.

Back to the earlier point of what exactly I'm taking issue with...

Many "AI" features that have been umbrella'd under this term already were available in some form or another for several decades, existing as programs or features of software. Just because some tech bro rolls out an update and slaps AI in front of their API doesn't mean the tool is actually "AI".

But if you want to discuss the merits of Microsoft's Clippy being an AI program, let's fuckin' go.

Full disclosure: I deleted my NaNo account. My MLs were booted in April with no warning nor discussion, and my local community is doing it's own thing independent of NaNo.

We can support and cheer each other on just fine without the groomers and plagiarists.

Also, again, what the fuck does "advocated-for" mean who over there is hyphenating random shit? This is coming from a kenning enthusiast, please what the hell is happening over there??

I'm coming out of my cage and things are not fine, I'm screaming at NaNo "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!"

If you haven't already been made aware how borked NaNoWriMo is, in the past 24 hours they've released an endorsement of AI after partnering with an AI software program.

The problem is, much of what they're saying is outright bullshit, and I don't even need to get into the nature of belittling the very writers they claim they're sticking up for by talking over them. It's an exploitation of a community, using them as a PR meat shield.

Because it should be awfully apparent NaNo's goal isn't to foster a healthy writing community. If that were the true goal, their missteps for the past year following the child harm allegations wouldn't be happening. Rather, instead, it's more likely the reason every company has relentlessly pursued and pushed AI: $$$

I don't think I'm entirely off base to say money is the reason AI is mucking up much of our creative spaces. At the peak of this fervor, you could load up some listicle titled '5 Ways AI Boosts Your Side Hustle' or some YouTuber claiming to make thousands a month with their AI writing, as if it were that easy to make a living writing and silly authors have just been leaving money on the table.

The mad gold rush that followed impacted literary magazines and publishing spaces, such as Clarkesworld Magazine freezing submissions as they were inundated with poorly written nonsense. The people behind NaNoWriMo, however, apparently believe Clarkesworld Magazine is just being classist and ableist in their anti-AI stance. Yes. Certainly because of those reasons.

And not because their submissions jumped an untenable amount, almost 500% from their usual submission intake, and cost the lit mag staff untold amounts of mental harm (as well as a very real number amount of staffing hours and financial costs to combat this problem).

But to that, NaNo Org argues that AI is cost-effective, actually!

Which, we're back to the opening argument that NaNo is full of shit (in case you didn't realize that citation link was sarcasm and not evidence in support of NaNo's stance). It may be free to the end user to access AI, notwithstanding the many many models one can buy including NaNo's own sponsor, but the financial damages being incurred by the use of this tech is anything but. The fact NaNo glosses through this in three little bullet points is insulting.

But what really has gotten me to write off about this on a mostly dead Tumblr blog, is that I've worked in the publishing industry all of my adult life and I've been a part of the creative writing community about as long as NaNo claims to. Hell, part of my contract freelance work has been to go through slush piles and evaluate, by hand, if the submission utilized AI or not. Full transparency, that work has helped me get through medical bills this year.

Yet that's my point. Someone had to rearrange their budgets to hire many people like me to combat rampant AI-generated submissions, from college admission offices to literary magazines to other publishers. What could have gone toward the print run of a special issue or increasing the marketing budget of a debut author now has to go making sure illegal, plagiarized work isn't being unwittingly published and endorsed. It's not classist to take a stand against a technology that's disruptive enough to put people out of business, but NaNo takes aim and fires off some bullshit claim they're pro-indie authors.

You might be thinking, "But Steady, if the business can't adapt to the market, they shouldn't exist!"

And to that I say, not every single little thing needs to have a financial commodity price tag slapped onto it. Not everything needs to make money. Things have a right to exist without a price tag stickered on them. The onus of this situation is because NaNo partnered with an AI sponsor. They're outright seeking to make money out of this. Because they're well aware of the PR fiasco, they're high-grounding the situation by claiming they're sticking up for the little guys, while outright taking money from a harmful billion dollar industry.

Meanwhile, the little guy will find no publisher will touch their work, that their writing has no copyright protections attached to them, and they'll be blacklisted by those they stole the work from. NaNo claims this is unfair; sorry folks, that's just how it works. Stealing from your fellow writers tends to get those same writers to rally against you.

I don't need to be told that the publishing industry has issues, that fanfiction writers are made fun of and lambasted. But most of those issues stem from and feed right back into the very problem NaNo is claiming to stand against: The financial commodity of writing.

NaNo has everything to gain by you believing them and using their sponsorship coupon so you can generate works as a writer that have no copyright protections and likely violated the copyrights of fellow writers works in doing so (I can play the bolded words game too, you pricks (see their update in response to the massive backlash this stance has generated online)).

The final point I have to say, is that in NaNo's defense they claim their online workshops are just full to the brim! See the demand! Look, look with your special eyes how popular AI is!! You fools, this is the future at hand!!!

Except, I, an avid anti-AI writer and publishing professional, attend webinars about AI all the damned time. Mostly to understand what new angle or developments we'll have to defend against. Every single one of these publishing industry or writing webinars are, in the end, a sales pitch to get you to pay them rather than a fellow freelancer.

Notwithstanding, it's a marketing and sales 101 faux pas to mistake interest in a thing, eyes on screens and butts in seats, for tacit endorsement in said thing. Besides the obvious point that people most impacted by this tech would be interested in learning more about it, there's the very real possibility that the same crowd who drives clicks to Forbes and YouTube videos is partially the same crowd that flocks to these NaNo webinars seeking to make a quick, effortless buck.

So, in the end, NaNo isn't speaking to writers. They're speaking to people looking to exploit a blind spot in an industry in order to make $$$ in our Capitalist Hellscape. And in NaNo's rush to join that race, they're trampling over the community they've grown and fostered for over 20 years.

The insinuation of this entire statement is that NaNo is standing tall for the "little guy" that the writing community has just let wilt and suffer for years, neglected and unheard. And it's totally not that NaNo nuked their own forums, a free, accessible resource for such writers to utilize, and without warning fired all of their volunteer staff all because they dropped the ball in moderation and safety checks (I'm not touching on whether the groomer is still working for NaNo since that situation is tainted by rumors, sensationalism, and directly conflicting stories).

And topping this all off with a pithy little cherry on this shit sundae: "For all of those reasons, we absolutely do not condemn AI, and we recognize and respect writers who believe that AI tools are right for them. We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that's perfectly fine. As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions."

So not only does NaNo condone plagiarism and theft, they're quick to both-sides the issue, only to immediately say "we're all free to make our own decisions!" Not said is the heavy implication, "oh but if you stand against AI you're a classist, ableist dickhead!" Which, if it wasn't obvious, is so far removed from the truth it's insulting.

In short, fuck NaNoWriMo.

Also what the fuck does "further-proof" mean.

[steadycoffeeflow]

...and fuck NaNoWriMo.

Christ on a cracker.

The condemnation of AI is anything but categorical. Even the most fervent opponents of LLM-based generative AI acknowledge that there are uses of Machine Learning (see what I did there?) that have the potential to (even, already have) make positive change in the world. AI is not a monolith. There is a difference between analytical machine learning and generative AI.

Of course generative AI has classist and ableist undertones. Because LLMs are trained on biased media, they include all the biases of the media they learned from.

Finally, there is currently no major generative AI system of which I'm aware that has not been trained on stolen media. Writing, art, music: all stolen by a bunch of rich guys, largely from poor people. Because these assholes have outright said they can't make a buck from generative AI if they have to gasp pay for the training data!

Do we even need to go into the ridiculous environmental costs of generative AI? Yes, yes we do. ChatGPT-4 uses a bottle of water per query, ~500 MWh of energy per day, and costs $500/minute to run.

I am severely disappointed in you, NaNoWriMo. I expected better.

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NaNoWriMo has gone full clown shoes, I fear

fellas... is it classist and ableist to expect people in the novel writing challenge to actually write their own novels?

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NaNoWriMo, the competition whose raison d'etre is making people write actual words for a month, declaring that you can do writing with AI is a predictably inane choice. But coaching their statement in social justice language about how banning AI is classist and ableist, now that elevates it to the sublimely dopey

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More of my take on the NaNoWriMo AI bs. This author was reading more in-depth on NaNoWriMo’s excuses for this, and my type of disability was brought up.

[steadycoffeeflow]

And this is what I was looking for when I was researching my rant this morning.

NaNo was drawing from both wells: a staunchly anti-AI sponsor and a full pro-AI one. There was no way for those two to co-exist in the same realm, and for good reason.

There's a lot of nuance and discussion to be had surrounding AI. Until those discussion are had without the end goal being "how do we make cash off this thing", there's no discussion to be had in the endorsement of generative works. Glad to see Ellipsus take a stand against this.

Especially given the flim-flam excuse of a statement NaNo Org put out.

We know many of you have seen NaNoWriMo's recent statements on generative AI...

Well, we have too—and that's why we've made the decision to retract our sponsorship of NaNo.

Your support and belief in human creativity, transparency and collaboration mean everything to us, and we're committed to staying true to that. Thank you all! 💙

You can read our full statement here.

The Ellipsus team xo

[steadycoffeeflow]

...and fuck NaNoWriMo.

Christ on a cracker.

The condemnation of AI is anything but categorical. Even the most fervent opponents of LLM-based generative AI acknowledge that there are uses of Machine Learning (see what I did there?) that have the potential to (even, already have) make positive change in the world. AI is not a monolith. There is a difference between analytical machine learning and generative AI.

Of course generative AI has classist and ableist undertones. Because LLMs are trained on biased media, they include all the biases of the media they learned from.

Finally, there is currently no major generative AI system of which I'm aware that has not been trained on stolen media. Writing, art, music: all stolen by a bunch of rich guys, largely from poor people. Because these assholes have outright said they can't make a buck from generative AI if they have to gasp pay for the training data!

Do we even need to go into the ridiculous environmental costs of generative AI? Yes, yes we do. ChatGPT-4 uses a bottle of water per query, ~500 MWh of energy per day, and costs $500/minute to run.

I am severely disappointed in you, NaNoWriMo. I expected better.

[steadycoffeeflow]

Popping in from the void to spread the news that the nonprofit National Novel Writing in a Month has declared that not supporting genAI has "classist and ableist undertones".

Also popping in to say that the main technology NaNo uses to track wordcount is wildly available for free, meaning either on your own or with friends you can practice the useful part of the experience on your own at virtually any time. Without people aggressively hounding you for donations or pushing the support of exploitative software and writing scams. Or like exploiting kids? They've done so much bullshit at this point I've lost track.

What the fuck is going on? At this point I think NaNo is actively trying to push it's primary audience away until it's just Derrick, the tech guy who is thrilled to generate 30 novels in 30 days. He's not donating shit to this Good Person Nonprofit, but he's super happy to self-publish all of his new manuscripts with stolen art work, reveling in the fact that he is not only a Real Writer, but now also a disabled rights activist somehow. Cool!

That is all.

No it isn't. Here, for those who might want their next read to come from a new or painfully familiar place.

Now that is all.

[steadycoffeeflow]

Dearest fandom and writing friends,

AIs have reaped yet another victim.

NaNoWriMo, yes, that NaNoWriMo, recently announced that it is in full favor of its users using AI to complete the November challenge.

As all the other people who defend AI, rather than engaging with the actual discourse behind the usage of those programs, the post prehemptively accuses the people who are critical of AIs of being ableist and classist, individuals who are doing everything in their power to gatekeep the art of writing.

This is, of course, absolute bullshit, and the post was so badly received that they had to edit it to make them look less like shits.

Furthermore, it serves to highlight a terrible message: poor and disabled people cannot and will not be good writers unless aided by programs who actively scour and steal material from other writers, writers who, according to NaNo's logic, are not poor nor disabled.

Calling this insulting is little.

[steadycoffeeflow]

The thing about the whole "being anti ai is ableist" is like...

Disabled people are effortlessly and needlessly excluded from everything all the time. So why is allowing generative ai in a fucking Writing Competition framed as an inherently anti ableist move when the genai submissions are NOT proveably created by disabled participants?? It would be different if ai was ONLY used by disabled people, but the majority of ai users are able bodied people using disabled people as an excuse.

In this world, a more believeable outcome of the "what about disabled people" perspective would be disabled people making art with ai and not being allowed to submit it to competitions. Disabled people are bitched out for asking for accommodations and often times just denied entry places out of laziness and ableism. Why are healthy able bodied people bending over backwards to create viable careers out of generative ai specifically if not for their own benefit.