The usual disclaimers: not posted for agreement (although I did get a chuckle out of the first image), if you share from my post please leave my commentary intact, originally posted by a friend I won't name unless they want me to because I'm not looking for a fight ... etc.

I really hope it's possible to have a middle-ground discussion about this.

On one hand, the idea that #AI-generated #text and #images are purely #plagiarism strikes me as fundamentally untrue. If you prompt #ChatGPT to write you a story, it will give you a combination of words which has never existed before. With a little back-and-forth, those words will be at least a reasonable approximation of the #story you had in your head when you started. Same with #Midjourney and pictures. That is a #creative act.

On the other, it's not just a tool like pen and paper, or word processors, or even add-ons like suggested text. You can plagiarize with all of those—but they don't *push* you toward plagiarism the way ChatGPT does, and although I'm not a visual artist I understand Midjourney is even worse. (I'm using those as the two best-known examples; I know there are lots of others.) My #writing contains turns of phrase from favorite books, and so does everyone else's. But not whole paragraphs or pages with the names changed ... if there's even that much editing.

So it seems to me that neither "nothing generated by AI can ever be true art" nor "stop whining, it's just another way to tell stories" is quite right. One thing for sure is that it's not going away, and things like the open letters urging a halt to AI development strike me as more attention-seeking stunts than serious attempts to solve the very real problems involved. We need to find a way to deal with it that respects *everyone's* rights.

Please tell me I'm not the only human, typing on my keyboard with my normal human hands, who sees it this way?