Using Chat GPT

This is an interesting question.

I think the first thing to remember here, is that this sight is rather purely for entertainment. These stories aren’t being graded, they aren’t essays to prove you have understood the material presented to you in an academic setting. Nobody is publishing their doctoral thesis here, nobody is writing legally binding contracts, nobody is making advertising claims that have to be accurate. Yes, we give things thumbs up when we like them, but even those are really just for entertainment, I’m not adding that I’m a trending author on HSN to my resume.

HSNadmin and I are very aware of our need to stop plagiarism when we see it, but the reasons plagiarism is a problem on HSN don’t really apply to AI the same way. It isn’t stealing another person’s work. It isn’t copyright infringement.

But then we come to the simple question of whether or not AI generated stories are worth posting. I can absolutely see HSN being flooded with flat bland repetitive story after story.

As it is the question of whether we should be enforcing quality standards comes up repeatedly. Poor quality stories make it hard to find the good ones. Poor quality stories take up band width and memory. Purely AI generated stories can be churned out so much faster than a well thought out one by a human. This site could easily be drowned in them.

I could see using a little bit of AI here and there as a tool. For example, nobody would be very happy reading my writing if it weren’t for spellcheckers (already been corrected at least a dozen times just writing this post.). I use the grammar checker feature on google docs and sometimes even go with the suggested autofill (mostly on texts and emails, rarely on stories since they aren’t as predictable,) which is basically light AI.

Sometimes, machines can improve the quality of something when used thoughtfully, like my sewing machine and serger are going to sew a sturdier seam than I will. However, I’m not going to just tell them to make me a blouse, I’m choosing the fabric, and either draping it or following a pattern. Having the sewing machine and using a pattern lets me create an garment faster and more easily. I can concentrate on the parts of the process that really matter to me, like getting a good fit on a uniquely shaped body, making a bold style statement through fabric choice or collar shape, etc. It lets one concentrate on the actually creative part, instead of using all my energy on just poking the fabric with a needle repeatedly in a straight line.

I could definitely see using AI to improve one’s own writing. I have seen stories here, that seem to have basically good ideas embedded in them, but they are a nearly impenetrable block of text without a single paragraph break. If AI could take those and make them readable…

I read the story in question. It’s fairly readable. It reminds me a bit of the writing of a nonnative speaker, which wasn’t something I would have expected from an AI. It definitely hiccuped and was a bit flat. I have read worse written by humans. So, not horrible, but…

This is just my take, but finding an AI art dataset that only uses images from the public domain, I believe, is fine. The questionable ethics come into play when an artist’s copyrighted work is being used to create art they are not compensated for.

I’m not a photographer, so an actual one may have different feelings, but I think AI renditions based on photographs are less questionable because there is just so much available online, ranging from pros to Aunt Martha’s pictures of her niece’s wedding. There’s much more for those databases to pull from, and although there are technically the same copyright issues at play, I feel like it’s probably more an issue for specific photos, whereas drawn art can have copyright issues based on style alone (if that makes sense).

One thing that doesn’t quite apply here but, I think, will be interesting is current rulings say that works that were created without human intervention cannot be copyrighted. So, for example, the fellow who published a book with a story written by AI and art produced through AI may not actually hold the rights to that book.

Nothing was decided regarding AI specifically yet, but there was a decision made by the US Copyright office regarding a selfie taken by a monkey.

“Expert opinion on whether Slater owns the copyright on the photographs is mixed. On 21 August 2014 the United States Copyright Office published an opinion, later included in the third edition of the office’s Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, released on 22 December 2014, to clarify that “only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention” and that “Because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author’, the [copyright] office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work.”

I have a feeling the exact definition of without human intervention will get a lot of attention in the coming years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute

I’ve noticed quite a few stories here and on other sites that seem to be entirely generated using ChatGPT recently. They’re fairly easy to recognise because the description of the actual cut tends to be quite low detail, and the ending usually has some sort of moral.

I don’t really oppose using it as a jumpstarter to get past writers’ block, or to generate ideas that you then expand on, but I’m personally not very interested in seeing the site overrun by low quality Chat GPT stories posted unedited, especially when they’re pushing good authors off the front page.

@gabriel

I did play around with it a lot and with properly defined commands you can get a lot out of it. Especially if you give it different options to choose from and then give it several runs, you can easily have a story retold with adjustments. It’s a nice tool and used properly it can easily keep up with the writing skills of 80% of the people here (which doesn’t make their stories worse, it just shows how good the tool actually is) – but things also get repetitive relatively quickly, which you then have to work against again with instructions.

In the end, you can probably write a good story just as quickly yourself 🙂

“Consensual is very important for it… So no Slaves, but yes BDSM can occur a bit, even a Dominatrix and Subs were introduced by itself.”
In the first days this did go pretty well even to a very drastic point. So drastic, I was pretty surprised, the AI offered it. Then they stopped it. But you can still beat around the bush in your commands to get a proper non consensual story. And the funny thing is: when it comes to a woman, it is blocked, when it comes to a man, any form of coercion and pressure works without any problem. Abusive seems to be programmed very one-sidedly in AI at the moment.

Another user has shown up submitting seven new stories all at once which appear to be ChatGPT outputs. Play around with it for a while and you can tell by the very distinctive way it ends its stories (summing up what the characters have learnt and nearly always forcing a happy ending despite it not making sense). I would really appreciate some sort of official response, officially allowing it (which I personally wouldn’t like), banning unedited chatgpt output, or perhaps a special category or tag at least so people who dislike this content can avoid it.

As far as I’m concerned it’s starting to get irritating – if I wanted to read an AI’s attempts at stories, I can read as many as I like by going to their site and generating them myself. I come here because I want to have a genuine human connection, as weird as that might sound.