all the frothing-at-the-mouth posts about how “don’t you dare put a fic writer’s work into chatGPT or an artist’s work into stable diffusion” are. frustrating
that isn’t how big models are made. it takes an absurd amount of compute power and coordination between many GPUs to re-train a model with billions of parameters. they are not dynamically crunching up anything you put into a web interface.
chances are, if you have something published on a fanfic site, or your art is on deviantart or any publicly available repository, it’s already in the enormous datasets that they are using to train. and if it isn’t in now, it will be in future: the increases in performance from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 were not gained through novel machine-learning architectures or anything but by ramping up the amount of data they used to train by orders of magnitude. if it can be scraped, just assume it will be. you can prevent your stuff from being used with Glaze, if you’re an artist, but for the written word there’s nothing you can do.
not to be cynical but the genie is already far more out of the bottle than most anti-AI people realize, i think. there is nothing you can do to stop these models from being made and getting more powerful. only the organizing power of labor has a shot at mitigating some of the effects we’re all worried about
this post had over 10k notes and lots of people in replies getting very angry and panicky and threatening imaginary bad actors and begging people not to put their fics into chatgpt. the reply is authoritatively saying “anything that is given to AI it can use it later to draw from.” no source! like - i don’t know if they save your prompts. they probably do for some other nefarious purposes. but:
these are the size of the training sets used to train gpt-3. as a rule of thumb in natural language processing, one word is on average two tokens. the common crawl dataset alone is around 205 billion words; for gpt-3 they don’t even manage to use all of it. this is the scale of the data they need. they are not re-training their model with the little prompts you put in, and even if they did, it’s like… a drop of water in the ocean. it’s not gonna have an effect on how the model behaves.
i think people are, on a gut level, still understanding these models as “collage machines.” they’re not. they are not borg-assimilating all your best ideas from your fics to frankenstein them back together. they are statistical models. they are compressing gargantuan amounts of data down into smaller (still huge, but much smaller) models of that data by looking at trends and likelihoods and repetitions. i’m not saying you’re a great person if you use gpt to autocomplete old fics but even if they were for some reason adding your prompts to their datasets, it’s not gonna have an effect.
the culture on here about anti-ai stuff has approached, like, mythology - making up shit about what they can do, talking about how scary they are, ghost stories, moral panic. this wild overstatement about what they can do only benefits the companies selling them, and those trying to use them as pretense to undermine labor.
to me demons are like cats just doing whatever they want causing problems on purpose, while angels are like hares theyre painfully aware of their place in this world theyve seen the end
Hi here’s another list of things I’ve read that are really important to me, on the loose theme of ‘fantasy urbanism.’ I still haven’t read Dhalgren.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. This is the most essential thing to read if you are even tangentially interested in anything about this list i think. Revelatory to me as a pulpy-literalistic fantasist.
Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson. Inspired by the Calvino book, an enormous overview of planned or dreamed cities that were never built.
Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer. Some of my favorite secondary-world fiction I have ever read. Short stories from the history of an empire at the ludicrous extreme of size, depth, history. The English edition was translated by Ursula K. Le Guin who is my favorite.
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. Beautiful book and deals with an invented setting and urban spaces with a more densely intellectual approach than I have ever seen.
Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas. An architectural history and “retroactive manifesto” for Manhattan, but some of the most interesting bits are about Coney Island in particular. Huge futuristic conflicts underlie every modern city.
The City & the City by China Miéville. This isn’t a lot of people’s favorites of his because its fantastic elements aren’t the loudest, but it’s so smart and bewildering and develops an allegory for emergent social strata in urban spaces that is really compelling.
The Event Factory by Renee Gladman. Just finished this; it feels loose and dreamlike and engages very clearly with real feelings of exploring new spaces, radically repurposing urban environments…
Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy. Not as totally concerned with cities as the rest of the list, but a really exciting and unusual example of worldbuilding from an intentionally political/utopian perspective.
Surregional Explorations by Max Cafard. The first few essays in this book deal with Surrealist and Situationist approaches to urban space and the unconscious of cities; it’s a weird jumbled book but I liked it
Addenda–
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Definitely the most overtly allegorical and argumentative of hers that I’ve read, but it’s Le Guin so it’s done in an elegant and narratively engaging way. Modern cities are shown through the perspective of a visitor from an isolated left anarchist community, allowing for intense & emotional engagement with the inhumanity and strangeness of the extremities of urbanism and capitalism in major cities. Also deals with the fastidious class-segregation that is a central throughline in every American city I’ve ever been in.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany. Not fiction, but engages with a lot of ideas this list orbits around. Most of the book is a sort of oral history of gay cruising culture in Manhattan in the 70s and 80s– this is developed into a really nuanced theory of urban development and the problems with what I think is called “new urbanism.” Part that sticks with me is the focus on interclass contact in cities and the huge cultural structures constantly being built to discourage it
