If this video concerning AI doesn't trouble/scare you, I'm not sure you have a heartbeat.

[highplainsdem]

12. If you went back even ten years and polled writers in the SFWA suite at a worldcon (world science

fiction convention) on whether scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, businesses and governments should invest heavily in so-called artificial intelligence requiring the theft of the world's intellectual property to even begin to work properly, you'd likely get a (nearly) unanimous "Fuck, no!". And any dissenters would probably have had so much to drink they'd misunderstood the question.

And if you asked them if they thought that theft-based tech should be widely used and effectively forced on people through tech devices and education - despite it hallucinating and being so unreliable all results should always be checked carefully, requiring a lot of time - the response would be laughter and writers wondering aloud why anyone would be so stupid.

You wouldn't need to go back to the Luddites. But they'd also have been amazed that anyone would want to use hallucinating AI.


Science fiction writer John Scalzi posted about that theft the other day:

Pretty much all of my novels are in these data sets, and I certainly wouldn't mind getting several million in damages. I even have a charitable foundation I could put that money into.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2025-05-27T13:33:13.562Z

I mean, look at this: 200 results. Which means all my novels, and my novellas, and my non-fiction work, and then many of them again across several translations. At 0k a pop, that's 0 million right there. I could probably squeak by on 0M.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2025-05-27T13:43:00.857Z