Wow, this article reality pissed me off.
I'm a ghostwriter. It falsely equivocates my career to using GenAI overall, especially egregiously multiple places, while also pretending to explore the issue thoughtfully.... 🤔 just enough to make its BS sound legit.
Yes, the ethics of ghostwriting can be a difficult topic, depending on various factors. And some of those sticking points can be a little bit similar to claiming LLM work as your own.
NO, the ethical issues of AI do not end with those vague similarities. Not anywhere close!!!
Even the opening example is a poor one to demonstrate the few similarities: A university newsletter that went out championing human connection and community was written by AI, and it got pushback from students. If that had been written by staff or hired out and credited, say, to the president of the org as is commonly done (ghostwriting), it would STILL be a human writing about human connection.*
Meanwhile, us ghostwriters are out here going, uhm, but what about our jobs? And us writers who write our own works are asking, but what about our books and posts which were plagiarized to make the GenAI possible?? And the towns with the loud, polluting, ever-hungry data centers which were forced into their communities are asking for them to go away. And the people who rely on a functioning earth to eat are asking what will happen when the resources run dry.
The existence of this propaganda itself is unethical. A piece pretending to care about any ethical question which leaves out a majority of concerns is another ancient arrangement which has been written about by real people for over a century:
A straw man.
https://flip.it/-AWwhH
* That's not even touching on comparisons between other kinds of work where one person claims credit for the work of thousands of unnamed people, what we in the industry like to call "billionaires" and "CEOs." Would that the ethics of this arrangement be questioned to this degree.
#GenAI #writersCoffeeClub #LLM #ghostwriting #ChatGPT
Ben Jeapes
Ghostwriters Central: Film, TV
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸
Rob Bignell, Editor/Author
HMDPublishing
