Yeah, it's been four days. It was a rough week, OK?

The first few days were full of trying to deal with the initial assessments and such for the home renovation (which also disrupted my sleep schedule because contractors like to arrive earlier in the day than I am normally functioning), at the same time as trying to finish a mountain of trivial but pecked-to-death-by-ducks work tasks, while simultaneously negotiating weather conditions that resembled the surface of the sun. And as a result of all this, I am way behind where I should be this month on story work already.

So much so that I don't really want to distract myself from render work by writing this, but my brain doesn't want to let me ignore it, so it's going to break my concentration anyway. Might as well just flush it out and have done.

There's been a lot of yelling the last two days on Bluesky because someone picked on writers who participated in a workshop which involved the use of generative tools back in 2022 ... when the situation was not what it is today ... and, after she turned over that rock and was notably non-apologetic about being disingenuous (she didn't disclose that the workshop she was griping about had happened four years ago until several posts down her thread), she deleted the original post because she was getting tired of the mentions, and acted like anybody who was up in arms about it was badly missing her original point.

Well, no, I didn't miss her original point. I went back, looked at several days of her post history carefully, just to make sure I wasn't missing it. Her point is zero tolerance. She refuses to distinguish between good, useful and interesting generative tools and bad, horrible, thieving, environment-destroying ones. To her they are all bad.

It must be nice to live in that simple a universe.

However, there is a point to be had in her point. A meta-point, if you will. She's dead wrong, of course, but there's a current-weather report lurking in there that we unfortunately have to acknowledge.

People have been using "generative tools" to make art for a long time. Long before computers. Tristan Tzara writing poems by drawing words out of a hat is generative art. A lot of what the Dada folks did was generative art. Quite a bit of what the Oulipo folks do and did (look 'em up, I can't do everything for you) was generative art, such as Cent mille milliards de poèmes. RACTER, an ancestor of today's LLMs (with a hand-built database instead of a stolen/scraped one), was generative art -- the name is an abbreviation of "raconteur," and some of the stories RACTER made up were pretty good.

All of that is good, all of it is art, all of it is legitimate. And all of it is tarnished now.

My Bluesky acquaintance Nora Reed, who has a great deal of discernment, has read the writing on the wall:

The problem is, I know several people who are using LLM tools for good things.

I have one friend who has found "talking" to an LLM to be of psychological value, and trust me, he's not one of these lonely techbros who has deluded himself into thinking the code is sentient*; he knows perfectly well it isn't. But it's useful to him nonetheless, for bouncing ideas and -- to be frank -- goading him past some of his own psychological roadblocks.

* (Many of these techbro types also know perfectly well that an LLM, which is at heart a very sophisticated draw-words-out-of-a-hat program, isn't sentient; but they are so very incel and so very incapable of relating to other human beings on any meaningful level that they deliberately ignore that so they can have a computer girlfriend. See "Sweet Eliza.")

Nora is far from the only person I know who has played with creating bots that generate text. I've done it myself, for that matter, and because I'm older than you I've done my time with both Eliza and RACTER, and I was fairly active for a couple of years in SITO's body of collaborative/collective projects, which are a form of generative art.

I am a computer programmer in my day job and a professional writer (in the sense that I have, on several occasions, been paid to write both fiction and non-fiction) the rest of the time. I am uniquely positioned to tell you that generative tools, as we understood them to be before Sam Altman and his ilk emerged from their pit of primordial toxic waste, are not a threat to art. They are not a threat to writing. They contribute to its fabric. They are good and of interest.

The problem, of course, is what's happened to these concepts in the last two-some years. The italics in the paragraph before this one are extremely important.

The people who are desperately trying to cram generative tools down your throat, to force them even into walks of life where they are unwanted and unneeded and make things worse, are doing so entirely because they are in the position of having a product which is not really required or necessary for anything, and in order to make a profit from them, they have to make these tools appear necessary. For everything. They want the tools to be inescapable. They want nothing to be possible without them. They want to get you to the point where you can't compose without them, can't reason without them, can't function without them.

My money is still on them not succeeding at this. The backlash is increasing every day, as people become aware that almost all the "improvements" these tools offer to everyday life are false economies. People are learning that Claude writes code that doesn't work, that LLMs offer very bad medical or financial or personal advice, that they write crappy prose that takes so much time for a human to correct that it would have been easier, faster, and less costly for a human to write it in the first place.

But I also add that in the United States in particular, money shouts a lot louder than anything else, and there is serious money behind this crap, not to mention financial risk. Altman will literally do anything to succeed in his plans because the alternative -- as he fully realizes -- is to go so broke so badly that he will probably end up in prison for debt (if we don't manage to put him there something else). And he has big buy-in, from universities and financial institutions and large corporations and government entities who saw this shiny object and believed his hype and invested in it, and now have to ignore the evidence and the pushback so that they don't have to take a horrible financial loss. Many of them already know the bubble is going to pop; they're trying to figure out how they can arrange it so they won't be holding any part of the bag when it does.

In short, I think we'll win, but that doesn't mean it won't be a long, nasty fight. And a lot of things are going to be ruined by then. Some things already are. The publishing industry, which already was on the shoals due to changes in the financial realities of the business, is absolutely being drowned in slop. Universities have already lost any remaining vestiges of the contract of trust between faculty and students, and it may never be fully repaired. People who make their living selling art are already on the ropes.

What I'm saying is, it's bad out there.

If you don't know any artists or writers personally, you don't see the worst bits of it. Remember, this technology was to some degree built, and is 100% being sold, by people who are incredibly envious of humans who have imagination and creative skills ... but will never admit it, so they condescend heavily. For them, destroying art and fiction is a feature, not a bug. That'll teach those freaks. These are people who have no interests of their own, very few skills of their own, no hobbies, no loves ... they sit in their overpriced houses and dream of eliminating the human element from the world, not just because it'll be a lot cheaper for them, but because they fundamentally hate and fear humanity.

Elon Musk is a sociopath. He also does not have enough imagination or insight to pour piss out of a boot. Sam Altman is probably also a sociopath. I don't know as much about him. The Amodeis over at Anthropic may not be sociopaths, and occasionally seem aware of their sins -- but the call of the money is such that they sin them anyway.

I'm coming to the point now. Thank you for your patience.

I don't want to throw the good uses of generative tools out the window along with the bad stuff. I do not like the zero-tolerance viewpoint. Even with the Evil Tools, there are still things which could and should be salvaged from this catastrophe. Natural-language searching, for example, is a desirable ideal for humans, and one which we've never come anywhere as close to achieving as with these LLMs. (And searching is an application of LLMs which does not involve data theft.)

I don't like the zero-tolerance viewpoint. But I think, right now, at this time in this place in this situation, we're going to have to have it.

That's the gist. OP of this mess (I'm not naming her on purpose) was wrong, but she was also right. She was wrong in that she was either too stupid or too oblivious or too disingenuous to discern good from evil. But she was right, unfortunately, in that right now we have to go completely scorched-earth. We can't go with half measures right now. We need to ruin the Altmans of the world. We need them to be in jail. We need them never able to show their faces in public again. Nothing less will suffice. We need the money here to be absolutely destroyed. We need the bubble to pop hard. We need businesses -- no, whole economic sectors -- to fail because of this.

Nothing else will stop them from destroying the earth.

That is not rhetoric. Not exaggeration. In a time when we are already failing to keep the planet from burning up, the calculation needs of these tools are unconscionable and the ecological damage unacceptable. Yes, I'm talking about data centers being built everywhere you look. This is not what we need to be spending our water and power on.

I'm sitting here contemplating an upcoming bill of fifty thousand dollars or so to make my home modestly more energy-efficient, to use less power cooling and heating it, to not use non-renewable fuels, and these clowns are out here trying to monopolize our power plants. Our aquifers are just about gone, and these assholes are trying to drink everywhere dry. It makes me physically ill.

One day, after we win -- after Sam Altman is in jail, after the Amodeis have had to flee the country, after Donald Trump finally has that heart attack, after we have shot Elon Musk into low orbit in a leaky cargo container -- then we can start the process of sifting out the good and non-destructive uses of these tools from the bad, then we can begin the difficult job of educating the public about how to tell the difference, then we can reintroduce the concept that generative art can, in the right circumstances, actually be art and has value. Then we can begin again to learn what we lost.

But we can't do it yet.