No AI training. Just stop. You don’t have my permission. #stopthescrape

I want to be positive about this, I really do. But of course, right off the bat, with the #stopthescrape hashtag I’ve gone full tilt negative. But if I step back for a second, and I’m going to take a big step back, I can see beyond all the crap associated with A.I. and get excited about the future, if only for all the wrong reasons.

You see, there’s a reason I’m collecting the A.I. posts under the name “Terminator Tuesday”. I love that movie. Love it! What I really wanted was a full movie of the dark bits with the rebels – ah, that would be humans – running around in the rubble trying to avoid elimination and extinction at the hands of Skynet. So wonderfully dark, I couldn’t get enough of it.

It reminds me a little of COVID-19. I’m a little embarrassed to own up to this, mostly because of all the tragedy surrounding the pandemic, but I was simply glued to the news. I won’t say I loved it, not at all, but in the month or so before COVID-19 became a thing, I was reading David Quammen’s “Spillover” and I truly loved that book. It’s a real doorstep of a book, charting the investigation of viruses that spilled over from the animal world into ours. Fascinating. Can’t recommend it enough. I also love the film “Contagion”. So, you can imagine, when COVID-19 was revealed to be the leveller it was, I was ready for it. It was game on. My interests had spilled over into my life.

Of course, as of writing this, Jane has just tested positive for COVID-19 (first time ever) and I’m guessing I will be following shortly after (my first time, too). We came back from England on December 30th, 2023, and we’re guessing we got blasted with something, by someone, on the plane.

Anyhoo, we’re all right, but it segues nicely into the whole A.I. thing, and how my interest becomes my reality.

I am genuinely interested in A.I. I find it fascinating. But, true to form, I am less interested in the practical applications of A.I. completing mundane tasks at speed – such as processing COVID-19 results, for example – and more caught up in the science fiction element, wondering when Skynet will emerge, or HAL will shut Dave out of the airlock.

Okay, at this point I should add that Skynet is the A.I. running a future world in The Terminator movies, and HAL is the A.I. from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Two examples of unfriendly A.I..

I’m less interested in friendly A.I., even though a benign artificial intelligence would be preferable to killing machines wiping out the human race.

Oooh, so dark.

I love it.

And that’s the problem right there. I love dystopian stuff. I can’t get enough of it. I watch it, read it, and even write it. Yep, I live the dark stuff, provided it’s fiction. And then, when fiction spills over into fact, well, it gets very exciting all of a sudden.

I do have limits.

I’m not interested in nuclear war. That’s one future I’d rather not live, thank you very much. I wish for that to remain fiction, and I tend to jump into the stories after the event, such as Mad Max.

Ooh, so dark.

Yeah, I’ve got to stop that. 🙂

Anyway, as I ramble through this first post about A.I. I can see that I have a true dilemma. It’s very possible that large language models such as ChatGPT will be the end of my career as an author, but the A.I. that may spawn out of them, might be the end of all careers. No, I don’t know how that will happen, but I’m going to explore that through the course of the next 51 Tuesdays.

I’m also going to do my very best to resist, and to fight until the end, when I can’t fight anymore. Because, honestly, no matter how entertaining The Terminator is, it was written by a human, and as yet, I have yet to read anything written by an A.I. that comes close.

Or have I?

Would I even know?

These damned LLMs are getting smarter and more convincing by the second. Depending on what we feed them, of course.

Which is why we need to stop the scrape, put the brakes on, and stop the so-called elite from filling their pockets from the spoils of the work they and their corporations have stolen from artists like me and you.

See what I did there?

Full tilt negative.

Just like I knew I would. 😉

Chris