Charlie Stross Declares His Fiction 100% LLM-Free and Criticizes AI Grifters
Charlie Stross – On the non-use of AI in my writing process
I refuse to use large language models in my writing, viewing them as tools that steal copyrighted work to compete with authors. While I acknowledge their utility for statistical analysis, I reject them as creative substitutes. My fiction remains entirely human-written, and I urge other serious authors to shun these systems to protect their craft and intellectual property.
They're no different from a burglar who robs you one day then comes round to sell you your stuff back the next morning.
- andai
> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
- Apocryphon
From the comments:
> I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
- LogicFailsMe
I don't think it ever gets old to restate that the singularity and all of the gradiose promises of a glorious 21st century have last mile problems.
But this post seems to mostly channel Harlan Ellison. And while he was amazing in his prime, with some absolutely legendary rants, he didn't age well in the end.
I do like his challenge to make LLMs useful to himself and to other authors though. Someone needs to make that happen and nearly exactly how he described it.
- keeda
This is very interesting coming from an author in whose writing autonomous, super-powerful AIs have been a common theme.
Consider his book Accelerando (which I'll take the opportunity to plug again, especially as he's made available for free here: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...) Not only did I find it quite engaging and thought-provoking, it is also proving rather prescient, and even helpful in decoding some of the things that are happening today.
For instance, in the very first chapter the protagonist spawns agents to go research something in the background and report back to him. And then a year ago, I randomly became curious about a rather involved topic (how fast could we feasibly replace all human labor with robotics), but I did not want to spend time researching so I outsourced it to Google Deep Research which churned away for almost half an hour and came back with a 30 page report with 49 citations via "actual internet searches for verifiable sources." (If you're curious about the conclusion: not for a very long time partly due to critical supply chain constraints.)
After I went through the report, it suddenly struck me: my agent may have executed in a GPU cloud instead of a cybernetic brain, but holy crap I had literally just lived a SciFi scene! A scene that I did not expect to experience in my lifetime!
Which is why I found TFA a bit unexpected. TFA says a few things that I would disagree with. Like, no, AI is not a "stochastic parro […]
- Fricken
Not being able to see the forest for the trees I suppose is a prerequisite for success in Silicon Valley, because it one had even a fraction of Stross's perspective on the matter they'd be in a different line of work.
- tptacek
Dude's an artist. He should do what his artistic intuition tells him to. I'm a software developer. I'll follow my own experience. It'll all work out.
- ainch
> It would be foolish to deny the effectiveness of image recognizers based on generalized adversarial networks (GANs), the key neural network technology underlying LLMs
I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.
- FL33TW00D
Crazy how forward thinking this guy was in 2005 vs today.