Craft Chat Gentle reminder not to plug other people's writing into AI without consent

[Dan Faulkner]

This is something I've noticed coming up more & more on writing forums etc. People share their work with beta readers, critique partners and the like, and the other person promptly uploads it to an AI, generates a report and hands it back.

The reader doing this is usually trying to be helpful. But given that getting critique from an AI is free and effortless, it should always be assumed the person asking for critique had a clear and specific reason for not doing so in the first place. Generally that's either a deeply held ethical objection or a refusal to help train the machine that's coming for our jobs (or both).

My point is, it can seem like a perfectly innocent, helpful thing to the person doing it, but the response I've seen from writers who've had it happen to them ranges from mild annoyance to such a deep sense of violation that they were physically sick.

 

[Sedayne]

Using generative AI to critique is strictly prohibited in the Litopia Lab.

https://colony.litopia.com/threads/...e-language-models-for-giving-critiques.14468/

If you are aware of anyone doing this, please let me know.
Thanks.

 

[RK Wallis]

I know I wouldn't dare harm another's hard work by being lazy enough to use AI. Yikes!

 

[Vagabond Heart]

I think we've all got familiar with what an AI generated crit looks like now, too. And we can call it out straight away. xx

 

[Pamela Jo]

This was done to mine when AI was still new. It means that early draft was fed into the dystopian machine and my work became part of the Borg. If the ancient Irish curses work, and many here literally swear by them, that person will be strangled by her own methods.

 

[Hannah Faoileán]

To add another reason against AI, if any of your manuscript has been written/edited by generative AI (including Word's editing service - switch it off!), it is no longer fully your own work and therefore not covered by copyright law (in Britain anyway). Because of this copyright loophole, most publishers won't touch it.

Apart from that, listen to Dave Eggers, about 39minutes in:

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[AgentPete]

Many AI providers, including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, can store “user interactions” to improve their models, and they all have a cavalier approach to respecting authors’ copyrights, as already amply demonstrated. In a nutshell – they steal our work.

It’s up to you if you want to upload your work to ChatGPT for a “critique”. But note, what you’ll receive is something that feels like a critique, because that’s in fact exactly what LLMs do - produce output that is designed to resemble something else.

What you can’t do, though, is to upload someone else’s work to ChatGPT. That’s totally disrespectful to the author concerned for any number of reasons, and it’s banned here.