#and i'll see people using chatgpt as a source too

[oxymoronicdumbass]

if i have to sit through one more conversation in which i have to listen to someone chirp about the benefits of AI, i am going to stab someone

[foggieststars]

I think you guys are thinking too much about it. AI or no AI a fic is a fic. It doesn't matter. You think you writing about real people is ethical? Writing them fucking and with controversial pairings? AI is all over the place like get used to it. If someone is using AI to fix their errors, or to just improve some writing why tf do you care? Y'all are just entitled. Not everyone's great at English. Just stfu and LET people write what they want. God.

hi, this is such an ignorant ask i'm incredibly surprised you felt confident enough to hit send! but i'll engage with you in good faith regardless.

yes, there are debates about the ethics of writing RPF, but i think comparing them to the ethical debates about the use of AI is frankly quite laughable. not only does AI have an incredibly detrimental impact on the environment, the impacts are likely to be unequal and hit already resource-strained environments the hardest. (i am providing sources for you here, something i'm assuming you're unfamiliar with since you are so in favour of relying on AI to generate 'original' thought). moreover, many AI models rely on data scraping in order to train these models. it is very often the case that creators of works on the internet - for example, ao3 - do not give consent for their works to be used to train these models. it raises ethical questions about ownership of content, and of intellectual property beyond fanfiction. comparing these ethical dilemmas to the ethics of rpf is not an argument that convinces me, nor i'm sure does it convince many others.

"AI is all over the place like get used to it" - frankly, i'm not surprised you're so supportive of AI, if this is the best argument in its favour you can muster. you know what else is all over the place?? modern slavery! modern slavery's extremely commonplace across the world, anti-slavery international estimate that about 50 million people globally are living in modern slavery. following the line of your argument, since modern slavery is so commonplace, this must make it okay, and we should get used to it. the idea that just because something is everywhere makes it acceptable is a logical fallacy. do you see how an overreliance on AI reduces your ability to critically think, and to form arguments for yourself?

please explain to me how i'm entitled for thinking that relying on AI to produce something of generally, extremely poor quality, is poor behaviour on your part, or the part of other people who do it. you don't have to write fanfiction in english, and if you do struggle with english, there are MANY talented betas in this fandom who i'm sure would be willing to lend a hand and fix SPAG. you are NOT going to improve your english by getting AI to fix it for you.

as @wisteriagoesvroom helpfully pointed out "art is an act of emotion and celebration and joy and defiance. it is an unshakeable, unstoppable feeling that idea that must and should be expressed" - this is not something you can achieve via the use of AI. you might think it's not that deep, but for many people who dedicate hours of their time to writing fanfiction, it feels very much like a slap in the face. and what's more, it produces negligible benefits for the person who is engaging in creating AI fanfiction.

i agree with you that people should write whatever they want, but the operative word in that statement is write. i do not, and will not ever consider inputting prompts into chatgpt a sincere form of artistic creation. thanks!

[utdrmv-confession-box]

Transcript: Hello, I am the "I use AI to write my PRIVATE Undertale fanfics" person

Mod, I am so sorry for hiding inside your inbox for replying to other people's reblogs, I really am, this is surely going to be my last confession about this topic.

People misunderstood my confession. I said it was fine to USE AI as a tool, not rely on it. Like.... this feeling of writer's block where you need to communicate with someone to write something. Like a roleplay. I was an rper so I kind of need a feeling of collaboration to progress.

I write a lot without AI. I just use it for fun SOMETIMES.

It's fine. to use it for your OWN entertainment. I DID say AI fanfics are soulless?? Usually you get inspiration from other sources, like music, or manga, or literally anything else that isn't AI, AI won't give you anything original.

I just wrote that confession because people don't take this topic with nuance. You seriously going to bully a kid for using chatgpt to write their fanfics the same way people used to bully kids who traced art? That happened before and it's ridiculous. At least get your point of view across without attacking or being rude about it

I'm not pro-AI, I don't write my main and ambitious Undertale fics with AI, and for the people who are saying it's bad for the environment... i need to do proper research on it and if it's right, i'm going to do my best to avoid supporting AI (it's already bad enough that it steals other people's works without their consent, I already don't put a cent in supporting that). That's it. No need to be so aggressive

[Note for mod: I'm so sorry that this is barely Undertale-related. If I don't see this get uploaded on your blog, I'll understand, it just fuels the drama. Just frustrated that I got misunderstood and dunked on so much, and got too scared to reply under my own name. Hope you understand as well, wherever your stance on the topic is]

[calypso-apologist]

i know you're probably really tired of questions like this but you're probably the only person i can ask this without getting set on fire, so... what's your opinion on character.ai?

mixed feelings.

don't get me wrong, i dread generative ai, but out of it all, i feel like c.ai is one of the least harmful ones. doesn't make it good, mind you, but it's the most... understandable, i guess?

i might be wrong about this and i can't really quote a source since i was told this by a friend and i haven't had a chance to research it properly since i have a shit ton of things going on these days, but from what i was told, c.ai uses other chats with the same bot to train it, so i guess it's not as terribly bad for the writers as chatgpt and such. don't quote on me on this, though, especially since i'm not a big tech person so doing proper research can be kinda difficult since i don't understand a lot of what i can try to read-

as far as i know, it also has the least impact out of all the generative ai things ecologically, but again, don't quote me on this.

still, ecology and my "pride" as a writer aside, as a person, i somewhat understand using it, i suppose.

i don't think people should be using it as much as they do. i've seen people who replace their social lives with bots. and i get it. many of those people are teens, often in terrible situations. i get why they would run to their comfort characters.

and yes, they could just turn to fanfics, but from experience, when you're going through a mental breakdown, you don't exactly look for things to fit your specific needs. so unless they have a comfort fic bookmarked, they are more likely to go to c.ai and seek artificial comfort.

i'm aware they could just text a friend for comfort, but many of them already feel like a burden. it's easier to go to a fictional character whose answers you can alter to fit exactly what you need. some of those kids (because i've mostly seen teenagers on it) don't even have friends and that's how they ended up on c.ai, or they don't have friends because they're on it. it's an unfortunate loop.

i will admit that i myself have a character.ai profile. i've made a few bots before and i do use it as a regulation tool sometimes when my mental state gets really bad because i can't currently afford getting professional help and i know my friends have a lot going on.

and i'll address a point i can see someone make now, that i can just write a fic or a story to make myself feel better. yes, i have done that before and i do try to keep doing it. one of my best literary pieces was a short story about how i felt like i'm a rotting corpse, forced to stay alive to appease others. but often, it gets way too much and i can't do that and unfortunately, c.ai was my only real choice at that time.

it's certainly not ideal, but there's a saying here in poland that a drowning man will grip a razor to save himself (rough translation but you get the point). i sort of view c.ai as this razor, i suppose. i'm aware it's not the healthiest way to cope, but if it's between that and active self-sabotage, i would rather grip that damn razor if it means not hurting people i care about.

character.ai and forming a proper opinion on it is a bit of a "between a rock and a hard place" type of situation in my eyes, though i'm not sure if that's the expression i'm looking for here. there are better things to do, better ways to handle yourself. but sometimes, it feels like there really aren't. and often, unless they're shown to you, you don't know about those better ways. it's a thing that you'd have to really look into and consider several stances to be able to actually form an opinion.

i know it's just much easier to go "ai bad" and be done with it, but for many, it's much more complex than that. personally, if it comes to c.ai alone, i believe that as long as it's a tool, it's not as bad, i suppose. the real issue happens when it replaces your actual social life.

i'm not praising or bashing people when it comes to character.ai because it's a complicated thing in my eyes. and it would be hypocritical, i guess.

ps: people will forget it, but chatbots like this, while now much more common, were a thing for a long time. i remember using a levi ackerman bot before character.ai and other stuff like that was even a thing. i don't remember the site since it was like... 7+ years ago, but it was a thing. just very, very unpopular.

[ashe-delta]

Last quarter I had this displeasure of having one of my classes get bait and switched from an English class to a class about using ChatCPT. That means I've technically taken a college level course on ChatGPT, making me far more qualified than I really wish I was on the subject, meaning I can "flex" my knowledge here.

For the record, ChatGPT is fine. There's no such thing as soulless art or writing, that's literally just Nazi rhetoric. The issue with AI is it's a misinformation machine, it'll take away a ton of important jobs, and it'll create a toxic environment for creators if not used for good. (And given the tech industry is using it, that's very likely!)

If you want to know what ChatGPT is actually useful for, it's creating summaries. They aren't great summaries, and I cannot stress this enough, it's not exactly responsible to say you've "read" an article when all you did was feed it to a machine which gave you the bullet points. But, like, as long as your on both sides of the machine (carefully tuning the input and the output) it's mostly fine.

Probably the most interesting assignment in that class was an essay compiling research. It didn't require a ton of work, mostly just comparing sources; you don't even need to have a super fleshed out point. The catch was that the professor provided all the sources—all of which talk about the downsides of AI, which I can respect. These sources were massive, talking 15-30 pages, and all of them full of the scholarly gatekeepy language that academic writing is known for, and there was 25 total. And you needed to use 18. For 7 pages! That is a lot of fucking reading for a college level course on an assignment we realistically had two weeks to do, especially academic reading.

The idea, then, is to not read it. The workload is too high on purpose, so you have to use a machine somewhere in the process to make it faster. So, make the AI read it. Again, this is not some high stakes academic paper, its just combining a bunch of sources together to make something slightly coherent. So if the AI can summarize the points, you can make the essay much faster than if you didn't.

From here, the prof expects you to just copy and paste the writing from the AI, but I wouldn't do that. That isn't what I said was "mostly fine", after all—carefully tuning both the input and the output. A human on both sides. What I'm proposing is to take what the AI said, and to make sure it's, you know, coherent, and make it into something better by actually analyzing it and doing comparisons yourself. I likened it to a "writing calculator". It gets something that's close enough that you can finish the job. But it's never always quite there. And it doesn't need to be! That is literally your job.

You can see where the main struggle with AI right now is, then. People are just taking the output at face value. The final product, push it out, don't check for misinformation, fire your staff, and let the AI do the job. It knows what its doing, after all. But it doesn't. It's essentially just a toddler babbling, guessing what's probably good enough.

One of the best things I've done to help my writing is to just create a summary of what I'm going to write. Instead of staring at a blank page, I'll write a 3 sentence summary of what I want this scene to be. Then, sentence by sentence, I can deconstruct it and add all the details back in. It's basically (totally) an outline, but the key thing is I already wrote exactly what I want, I just have to spice it up and give it life. The hardest part of writing, after all, is staring at that blank page. Anything is better than nothing.

You probably see where this is going, but AI is pretty decent at putting anything onto the page. It's also pretty good at writing pretty shitty. That's where you edit the summary that it's provided and make it something actually worth using. In academic writing, this would look like not letting a single word of it touch the page (also, because that's plagiarism, as its not your words). Instead you take it's thoughts, compare it to the sources itself (you're going to have to at least skim the sources to make sure its right). Don't do this in a high stakes academic writing environment, but lets be real, your 100-200 level courses aren't it. In creative writing, this is essentially just putting a prompt in and using it as a guideline or outline for the writing. Again, not letting its words hit the page.

This approach to writing with ChatGPT shocked my professor, which is weird, because I figured it's kinda the normal way to write something? You wouldn't let someone write your paper, but you would let someone tell you how a source might be useful, even if you need to double check its right. He's even thinking of changing the class to better fit this human on the input and output angle, which is deeply flattering. But it also goes to show just how volatile the market for AI and ChatGPT is right now. No one is actually sure how to use it right, everyone is just guessing.

All this to say, AI is not the devil. It is being wildly misused and no one can deny that, but the AI itself isn't at fault (although it's databases could be sourced a little better than that). It's the people using it. I have no plans to use ChatGPT in the future for, well, anything, but I can't discredit it completely, given it was actually helpful.

Now stop using it to automate things that DESPERATELY need a human in the production line.

[deviantartdramahub]

So I, Donald J Trump, have been thinking about what I said before, and I realized that I could only feel 99.9% certain about what I said being true, not 100% certain.

It's not one of those things you can just ask anyone, as it's the equivalent to a metaphysical question that has no physical indicators.

So I thought "if there was anyone in the whole world with both the knowledge on the matter and the honesty to give a correct answer, who would it be", and the epiphany came to mind. "I know" I thought, "I'll ask AI/ChatGPT, that source of knowledge people undermine for the same reason they undermine Wikipedia, because it just works."

So here is me asking the robots among us.

You've heard it here folks. The AI have spoken. People who praise the supposed power of tracking methods are full of themselves. You know you're losing your battle when there are two major neutral sources and you have an excuse to dismiss them both (and as a side note, THAT is how you make a poll, you don't make every answer attack someone without one that says something like "don't care", or you're just trying too hard, which might explain why it only got ten votes and twenty TOS violation reports).

To hammer the point home, the idea mentioned above is one of the things mentioned in the ten e-cepts which are well known here as etiquette, and I decided to ensure AI knew the full idea of that before asking if it had any objections (keep in mind, as I found out, AI really, really have a sense of being able to read between the lines).

Objections existed but were minimal.

This proves AI is not a simp but still happens to approve of the ten e-cepts for the most part and thus the idea is driven home that the people making the accusations are the opposite of being onto something. But they're still going to find success in undermining everyone with things like "wow you talk a lot, you must be stooooopid" or "considering anyone spent time communicating, they must be [insert slur here]". Imagine being offended so much by that everyone can see AI shaking its head; who is your audience again?

People really neglect the appeal, if only everyone knew better.

[dallasewing]

Introduction Post

Hello, hi, and everything else, and welcome to Next Level, a skills development blog within the wider world of UpSkill and their musician development resources! This blog focuses on learning skills that will help to boost careers within the industry and allow for people to be better equipped for this world of work! We help you folks at home to build up the strength and courage within desired areas so that you can apply them to your own careers and hobbies. So, let's begin with some introductions, shall we?  

I'm Caleb, your tutor/mentor/guru/deity/best friend at UpSkill, and I'll be coming on this journey with you peoples! I'll be looking into some key skillsets over the next eight weeks and hopefully helping some of you folk to boost your own skills in similar areas! 

A bit about me: I am currently a music production student and hope to enter the industry as a producer/studio engineer/session musician/songwriter (honestly, I'm not too sure which direction I'd rather explore further, yet all of these inspire me). My musical idols and inspirations include Josh Tillman (you'll know him as Father John Misty, or from Fleet Foxes), James Murphy (the mind behind LCD Soundsystem), Jeff Buckley (from the band Jeff Buckley), Ed O' Brien (from Radiohead), Mark Ronson (the man behind Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk"), and John Mayer (the world's greatest Jimi Hendrix impersonator).  

As I mentioned earlier, I want to be a producer/studio engineer/session musician/songwriter (ChatGPT defines this as a "Multifaceted Sonic Artisan" which I love the sound of, so thank you very much Sam Altman). With all that in mind, for the next eight weeks I've chosen to look into four key areas of skills development: Recording Techniques, Songwriting, Mixing + Mastering, and finally Instrumental Techniques. These four skill areas each provide essential skills and knowledge that will be used both in my specified career path and in further opportunities that the industry may provide.  

This blog will produce bi-weekly posts containing an overview of the goals for the upcoming two weeks, a reflection of the weeks just gone, as well as folder links containing all the research and sources that I've used in those weeks to help me through. I'll provide evidence of my improvements and actions taken within those weeks in the form of 'Note Summaries' and 'Action Lists'. Finally, I'll upload a copy of an eight-week plan that has been adjusted to suit the needs of the next two weeks.  

With all of this in mind, I hope to be able to give you folks a tool to help you boost your own knowledge and skills along with me, and by sharing my progress as well as notes, resources and evidence, I hope that you'll be able to follow along and achieve similar improvements to me. The overall goal being that you'll be able to see what I've done, use my notes and evidence to boost your own knowledge, and then be able to apply this to your own work! 

So, the next two weeks? Well, we're going to be looking at how to record a drum kit and guitars, exploring how different factors - mic placement, microphone choice, instrument construction, choice of 'accessories', and recording methods, to name a few - can affect the sounds heard within these recordings. We'll be exploring how a composer and songwriter can use rhythm within their work as a tool for creating emotion and enforcing the feel and groove of a track. Then, using the results from recording drums, I'll be exploring how to mix a drum kit, applying volume and panning alterations to balance, and applying compression to individual stems, whilst exploring how compression can be used for building up character and tone in a recording. Finally, I'll be looking at building up my skills on the drums and bass guitar, practicing some essential drum rudiments and exploring bass playing techniques. 

 I chose to cover these areas as I feel these will be able to provide a grounding level of skills and resources that can then be built upon and reused within the future weeks, and these skill areas can all be used within the music industry and in the careers I mentioned. 

Okay, so what about afterwards? I'll be looking further into different skills that build from these essential starting points - all of which will be focused within the four key areas mentioned - and I'll also be using some of the resources, knowledge and evidence gathered from these first two weeks to assist me going forwards! 

Finally, after the eight weeks I'll put out a final post discussing what went well over these weeks, and where things went wrong and how they could be done better if we could start again; this will not be perfect by any stretch of the imagination, simply because we're all learning here!

I'm really hoping that you people will enjoy learning along with me over the next eight weeks, and I'm looking forward to seeing how you folks have done! 

I'll see you around! 

Caleb 

P.S. Here are the folders for the PREP work (Week 0) for each of the four sections: Recording Techniques, Songwriting, Mixing and Mastering, and Instrumental Techniques. And here is a link to my first version of the 8-week plan! 

Project rationale

[mel-the-pirate-prompt-reblog]

Not to bring up "old" stuff, such as the OTW May Signal bit that was removed after some backlash, I wanted to see it. I threw the OTW into the Wayback Machine, went back to May 9th, and was able to see just what they pulled from the Signal after the community backlash to see what they regret adding to this month's Signal.

So I copy-pasted it, since I bet others who didn't read it wanted/want to, too. You can also read it directly from the OTW May Signal on the Wayback Machine here.

Quotes and etc are under the cut. All blue text is a link.

This is what they cut out of May 2023's Signal:

For Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, the OTW’s Legal Chair, Betsy Rosenblatt, was interviewed about AI legal issues*. Betsy pointed out that having AIs learn from works such as fanfiction meant that they weren’t only using old works from the public domain to learn about the world. “That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.” What’s more…

"I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….

Will fans will take up this challenge?"

Thought it might be worth noting that the OTW did add this about AI and Data Scraping on the Archive on May 13th.

*The interview is still up, but just in case, I'll be pulling the link from the Wayback Machine instead of the actual link.

I will be highlighting a few important points (imo) in case people don't want to read the entire interview. For longer highlights, I will be adding bold/italics/underline to help people keep from jumping around the text and read out of order (I know I do, and that tends to help me).

Because I'm having Thoughts about AI scraping, I might make a Tumblr-esque essay and put my English major to use looking into some of this interview (If I ever do, I might add a link to this post). Highlighting things and reading through this interview makes me want to pull my stuff from AO3, and I've only just started posting there a year ago.

Highlighting phrases and sentences does not mean I agree with them. It means I think they are important to see and consider.

Here's the interview that Signal links to:

...Betsy Rosenblatt is the legal chair for the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving fan works.... The interview with Betsy follows.

Katherine: When you think about AI technology, fan works, and copyright, what excites you? And, what keeps you up at night?

Betsy: One of the things that excites me—which is probably a bit off to the side of what most people are talking about with AI and copyright—is that AIs are reading fan fiction now. For a long time, machine learning relied almost exclusively on data sources that were known to be in the copyright public domain, such as works published prior to 1927 and public records. The result of that was that machines were often learning archaic ideas—learning to associate certain professions with certain races and genders, for example. Now, machine learning is turning to broader sources from across the internet, including fan works. That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.

I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….

As for what keeps me up at night, I remain mostly optimistic. I think it would be a very sad turn of events if some of the newly begun litigation about data crawling and scraping ended up preventing machines from building contemporary, inclusive, broad-based data pools to draw on. I think it would be very sad if people turned to AI-created works instead of finding, exploring, and making fan works of their own. But I don’t think either of those things is very likely to happen. Fans make fan works because they love doing it. They feel compelled to tell the stories they imagine, and they want to share those with communities of other fans. They use fan work creation to build skills and find their own voices. I don’t think that the emergence of new technologies will stop them from doing that.

Katherine: Artists have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that AI companies violate copyright law when they create databases of copyrighted images to “train” their AI image products. At least one of the companies in the suit, Stability AI, says that this is a fair use: “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.” What questions would you like to see a court ask when analyzing whether ingesting copyrighted works to create AI-training databases is a fair use?

Betsy: I tend to agree with Stability AI’s statement. I would like to see courts consider the “training” process separately from the process of generating works. It is, of course, possible that a machine could generate an infringing work. But the process of training that machine involves something very different—turning expressive works into data and creating relationships based on that data collection. We call it machine “learning” for a reason. A well-trained machine won’t generate an infringing work, but it needs as large a pool of data to work from as possible to do that. The mere fact that an AI can create something infringing doesn’t determine whether the gathering of information is infringement. Consider the classic Sony v. Betamax case: The VCR can be used to infringe, but it has noninfringing (fair) uses, and therefore the VCR does not inherently infringe. I recognize that the analogy isn’t perfect, but I find it persuasive. In general, courts have found that “interim” copying isn’t infringement—that is, copying isn’t infringement when it occurs inside a machine and does not, itself, make copyrighted works perceptible to people—and I think courts should continue to follow that logic.

Katherine: Will the Supreme Court’s 2021 Google v. Oracle decision have any bearing on this case?

Betsy: I hope so. That case highlighted that we shouldn’t be locked into one definition of “transformative” work, and that copying for the purpose of engaging in a different technological use can be transformative copying.

Katherine: What would you say to online creators who might be discouraged by AI technology?

Betsy: You will always make your work better than an AI can. What matters about your work is that it comes from you. That makes your work irreplaceable, and it will always remain so.