It can be, unfortunately, a hard thing to tell a writer or artist that their use of LLMs is a betrayal of their own talent, and of the publisher that is interested in their work.
It is, though. It is a betrayal.
It’s hard because it LLMs are simple to use, so easy, increasingly integrated into our media economy, and socially normalized. LLMs are accepted the same way the rest of our destructive economy is accepted. The extraction, abuse, malfeasance, ruination, war, death and suffering always happens somewhere else, at some other time, or is anyway, if it is right in front of our faces (San Francisco, you wealthy, decadent dowager, I’m looking at you and your enormous population of unhoused human beings) so decoupled as a matter of conscience from everyday life that it seems as ordinary as hopping in the car and going for a drive.
It’s hard because it is ordinary to hop in the car and go for a drive, and we do compartmentalize the act away from the oil wars, climate change, the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and all the rest, all the rest, all the rest …
It’s hard also because LLM technology itself has value. It has applications in the sciences and humanities. It has creative opportunity.
The problem is the decoupling of conscience, the absence of an ethical framework, a lack of differentiation between any humanist application of the technology and its abusive economic context.
The problem is the commercialist structures that are advancing LLMs as a policy agenda designed to consolidate money and power, developed without scruples, in a manner that parasitizes (unto death!) the social, cultural and economic host body — humanity itself.
LLMs as applied today are in that regard the apotheosis, the summation, the highest achievement and ultimate conclusion of the predatory, coercive, abusive economic system that dominates our lives. The ecological cost, the hollowing-out of livelihoods, the application of the technology for purposes of surveillance and control — all of these typical misuses of any technological innovation scale up so rapidly in the LLM context that apocalyptic consummation, so to speak, seems inevitable.
So, to scale down from that macro to the micro: The use of LLMs in one’s art is almost inevitably a betrayal.
It is not the same as the introduction of photography or mechanical reproduction. The use of LLMs as a distinct creative technology remains largely unexamined; they are instead sold as a crutch or method of “improving” one’s creative endeavor — something that by its nature cannot be “improved” as art by conformity within a statistical scale of probabilities.
By using LLMs for that purpose, the writer or artist betrays their own talent, vision, and opportunity for growth.
The writer or artist also betrays the trust of the publisher (hi) who wants to support them, who asks for their work unadulterated by any sort of LLM application.
Please. Do not violate the trust a supporter puts in you, and likewise, do not betray your own great work by surrendering it to the engines of conformity and exploitation.
