Playing With Fire

I was going to have Lorraine act a bit like the Filth-zombies and yell out some of the more sensical phrases, but as usual things went differently in writing than in planning. Desmond’s mostly tried to take them on from a distance (or takes them out fast) so doesn’t get to hear them mumbling about groceries.
I chose a slightly-reference surname because canonically Carter doesn’t have one.

Main Points: Assassin's Creed/The Secret World
Summary: The confrontation with the Witch.
Word Count: 2375
Rating: Teen 

( you will need the witch's cabin key )

 

AI and Plagiarism

It sucks to hear that Ao3 has been scraped...again...by techbros to train AI.  I saw a few people on Reddit saying that people should be flattered to hear that their work was valued enough to be targeted, and I think that is the wrong way to look at it.  A pretty much feature-length small time video you might have heard of explains this (Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Hbomberguy).  (Note that 'small time' is sarcasm.  Feature length on the other hand is 100% not.)  Respect doesn't match how I hear techbros talking about creative works.  They kinda like the end product, true, but they think it's unfair that someone should be paid for something so "easy" while they slave away doing "hard work".  They devalue the art and the people who do it.  It's not respect that has them stealing the work of others.  It's contempt.  Not making it opt-in isn't an oversight.  It's a feature.  They consider creatives beneath them, and think they should be able to just steal work whenever they want and creatives shouldn't fight back or talk back because, again, they should 'know their place'.  It's partly just to reassert dominance. 
Before they say "oh but getting the exact right phrase to get your AI to give you what you want is so hard, it took hours and hours, guys, I'm a real writer/artist too"--yeah, it can be easy to sunk cost fallacy having wasted hours of your time.  I've been there.  Like many people back when AI was just a 'novel curiosity', I tried Dall-E and some of the others back when they were free, before the specifics of exactly what they'd been trained on came crashing in.  And it can be frustrating, and maybe sometimes can feel like writer's block.  But I would much rather commission an (actual, not-scam, not-AI) artist.  Because you know, if you tell a professional artist what you want, they can do a human thing and actually have a dialogue with you about the product.  AI "writers" and AI "artists" aren't creatives.  They're just commissioning a product, only rather than actually giving money for real fellow human beings who could use that for rent or food, they're lazy and don't want to deal with other human beings and are giving that work to a slightly more sophisticated autocorrect trained on stolen words and ideas, and in the process also wasting a lot of time on that commission rather than spending the money.  It's overcomplicating the process to make people feel like they're actually doing something valuable and doing "work".  The point is to undervalue creative work (anyone can do what I do by just...getting an AI!) and get credit for themselves by being so 1337 and awesome while doing the least amount of work.
So no, I'm not flattered.  I am slightly fascinated by the mental gymnastics and creative bankruptcy, and I sincerely wish AI trained in creative fields and on stolen data (rather than, you know, actually owning the data; there are smaller scale, like, science AI trained and used by the specific universities or medical companies that are actually being ethical because that's affordable on the small scale) the fate of NFTs.