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Can you think any situation where it is ethical to use AI in the creative process? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 week ago by FavouriteShapes@sh.itjust.works to c/writing@sh.itjust.works

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Let me assure you that the idea of AI disgusts me. Not just because it debates the quality of work and is a "cheat" to get past the word target, but because it stripey the writer themselves of their accomplishments.

However, it does strike me that people might want to write about subjects that they don't know a lot about. Scientific knowledge, crime, historical stuff. Could that be an ethical place to use AI - not to write it, but to ask "what would confectionary in the 1300s look like?" (For instance). Just niche questions.

Or is there a much better, easier way to look up niche real-world details like that?

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well, the ethical side of things is more about how LLMs were made, rather than what they do. However, you would also need to disclose what use you made of even the most ethically built LLM.

That being said, the specific use case you're positing is bullshit. You can't ai away research. Worse, it is likely to backfire because GIGO.

What you're describing is just a fancy search engine, and you can't trust any of the ai driven ones to give good information reliably. Hell, it's hard enough to use a search engine to do research now, because mass generated shit articles clog everything up. Using ai to parse ai results is just absurd.

If you aren't capable of running a search on your own, chances are high that you won't be able to turn anything into a useful story anyway. There's a degree of competency to writing. It's called "craft", and no amount of ai can bypass it if you want to write. So learning how to parse bad search results into useful information is part of the learning curve. Either that, or you learn the Dewey decimal system.

Edit: to answer the title question: editing. Self published writers simply don't have access to editors and copy editors. A good, locally hosted, LLM would be able to fill that gap