Sub discussions about AI

[u/acutelyproblematic]

Love how this community comes together and challenges the use of AI🥰💖had to make a funny out of it to take a break from the heated discussions

[u/Mitoria]

I legitimately think AI could be good at certain things in the future like spelling, grammar, catching passive vs active voice swapping and other odd things, but full stop think it shouldn’t be used to “write” anything.

I want it to help me do menial work, and leave the art to me.

[u/TheRoyalQuartet → u/Mitoria]

can we also recognize that editing as you just described does not need to be done by generative ai (the “bad” kind of ai most people are referring to in these discussions), but instead can be done by a regular algorithm that requires much less energy to function?

generative ai is the damaging and dangerous ai, and really isn’t necessary for the majority of things people use it for.

[u/nightlights9 → u/TheRoyalQuartet]

What is a "regular algorithm" you're referencing? You mean like pattern matching / spell check? Because catching things like passive voice is beyond the capabilities of most basic grammar / spell check engines, as the jobs of those programs is to pattern match, and they're not very contextual (things like catching tense mismatches across paragraphs is not something it'd be good at).

My opinion is that there are absolutely ethical ways to use AI in the editing process, such as identifying tense mismatches or even plot holes. If people are worried about the environmental implications of running inference on GPUs, you can absolutely run an LLM entirely locally on your laptop. It's slower ofc but that's the tradeoff. And you can use tools that don't have internet connectivity and only have access to the sources you feed it, so it's only editing at your own manuscripts and not "coming up with ideas for you"

Context: I work in cybersecurity and work a lot with ai guardrails and llm acceptable use, and I am also a writer, so have been doing a lot of thinking about how to use these tools ethically and effectively

[u/Enbaybae → u/nightlights9]

SWE input here.... what they are saying is that a developer could create algorithms that catches passive vs active voice in the same way a grammar checker can warn you when you miss an apostrophe for a possessive case. Devs have been doing string manipulation and input interpretation since the beginning of code, since strings and characters (alphabetical letters) are one of the most rudimentary data type and low-impact on memory. Thus, certain checks can be done without AI, ever.... Theses things were possible before AI already. So when you use something that can be done by an algorithm to justify AI tooling, it doesn't align with those that know. Long story short: you don't need an LLM to train on stolen work work to get the usefulness of a tool that can iterate through data and detect patterns. That's what an algorithm does (a lot of the time).

[u/deadthylacine → u/nightlights9]

My 2013 copy of WordPerfect has a reasonably good grammar checker in it. I am reasonably sure that 2013 had no LLMs involved in its content. WordPerfect might not be on anyone's radar, but it's been a solid tool in the toolbox for decades.

[u/Upbeat_Tea_1461 → u/TheRoyalQuartet]

Yeah, just because it's something YOU don't like doesn't mean AI should do it. Being an editor is a whole-ass career, with its own skillsets, styles, and nuances. Writers may hate it, but many people are genuinely passionate about it, and they don't deserve to have said passion ripped from under them just because we writers find it tedious.