Tag: controversy

My spicy take on the ethics of AI art

There is nothing unethical about using generative AI to write or make art. Those who say otherwise either haven’t thought through their position, or they are lying for rhetorical effect. Or both.

If Andrew Tate wrote a book titled How To Enslave Your Woman For Fun and Profit, would he be within his rights to demand that no woman ever read that book? If you believe that AI is unethical because it was trained on writers’ and artists’ work without their consent, congratulations—that is exactly the position you have taken. You can’t pick up one end of the stick without also picking up the other.

Whether or not writers and artists were fairly compensated for the use of their work is a separate issue. Many of these AI companies obtained their training data by indescriminately scraping the internet, which means the used a lot of pirated work. But if using copyrighted material to train an AI system is fair use—and here in the US, the courts have ruled that it is—then all that they owe you is the cost of your book. So if your book is $2.99 on Kindle, that is what OpenAI owes you. Congratulations.

Does Brandon Sanderson owe Barbara Hambly royalties? Brandon Sanderson has sold something like $45 million in books, comics, and other media. Barbara Hambly struggles to pay her bills. Barbara Hambly wrote Dragonsbane, the young adult book that inspired Brandon Sanderson to write fantasy. Clearly, her work had a deep and lasting influence on him. So does he owe her?

If you believe that AI companies owe artists and writers more than simply the price of their own published work, this is a question that you must wrestle with. If it counts as “stealing” to train an AI on artists’ and writers’ work, then every artist and writer is also a thief, and owes royalties to the people who inspired them. Which is why the word “plagiarism” has a tight definition, and why our legal code recognizes fair use.

There is nothing unethical about using generative AI to write or make art. Almost everyone who says otherwise is either lying to themselves about that fact, or lying to you.

Why would someone lie about that? For the same reason people accuse you of being a racist, or a sexist, or a fascist, or a white supremacist, or a Christian nationalist… because using that term gives them power. They don’t actually want to make a reasoned argument. They just want to “win” the argument without ever having to make it in the first place. They use words that they know will get the reaction that they want, and they scream them as loudly as they can until they get it. That’s what the public discourse looks like in 2025.

To be fair, this is not just something that happens on the left. Plenty of people on the right will scream “woke” or “based” or “demonic” to cow people into accepting their point of view. These words do have meaning, and can be used to make a well-reasoned argument—just like “racist” and “fascist” have meaning. But most of the people who use these words are just wielding them like rhetorical clubs to bully their way around.

There is nothing unethical about using generative AI to write or make art. Most of the people who say otherwise are just using the word “ethical” to mean “things I don’t like.” They don’t believe in objective good or objective evil, and instead believe that things like truth and morality are relative. In other words, they think that good and evil change depending on who’s looking at it. This is why so many writers today can’t write a compelling villain (or a compelling hero, for that matter). They just don’t understand how good and evil work.

So why should you listen to them when they scream at you for using AI? You shouldn’t. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Or worse, they do, but they’re lying to you, because they want to compel you not to use AI in your art. Why? Because they’re afraid that if you do, you’ll create something better than what they can create. And on that point, they’re probably right.

A hot take for Carl

One of the members of my writing group recently posted on Facebook that for his birthday, he wants his friends to share their most controversial and/or hilarious “hot takes.” Here’s mine:

SFWA (The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Association, or whatever the hell it is now) was founded by perverts and communists to purge the science fiction and fantasy genres of any authors who love America, believe the Bible, and oppose the genocide of the unborn.

SFWA was also created to suppress any stories that might challenge the philosophies of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Sigmund Freud, John Money, Michelle Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, and the Marquis de Sade.

Their ultimate goal was to prevent another George Orwell from writing a book as effective at setting back their political project as Animal Farm and 1984, and to make the world safe for the normalization of pedophilia.

TL;DR: SFWA was created by perverts and communists to ruin science fiction for anyone who isn’t a pervert or a communist, and they largely succeeded.

2019-11-14 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the November 14th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

So the latest controversy in SF&F fandom is the stripping of John Campbell’s name from the Campbell Award. The latest issue of Locus magazine has an op-ed from Cory Doctorow defending that decision, and it was so deserving of a fisking that I went ahead and fisked it myself. You can find it on my blog.

That said, I do think there were some good things in Doctorow’s piece. The message in the second half of the article, that people are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and that we should learn from our misdeeds and set them right, is a message that I think we really need to hear, especially in today’s cancel culture that defines everyone by the worst thing they’ve ever said or done.

However, the good parts of the article are completely contradicted by the bad parts, where Doctorow argues that Campbell’s entire legacy is tainted and therefore needs to be cancelled. He also (surprise surprise) brings up the Sad Puppies and calls us all “white nationalists,” “Nazis,” and “the misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF.”

It’s not that I want to defend Campbell’s sexism and racism. I’m sure he had many odious views. I could even be convinced that it’s appropriate to retire the Campbell Award and replace it with something else, similar to moving offensive Confederate statues out of the public square and into museums instead.

The problem is that Campbell’s detractors are just as odious in their worldviews as he was, if not more so. When accusing someone of being “male” and “white” is enough to get them cancelled, how can that be anything but sexist and racist?

Which brings me to the ugly parts of the article: the naked hypocrisy. Doctorow stops just short of calling for the digital equivalent of a book burning, but he left me with the impression that he’d be the first to light the match. I don’t think that’s a misread either, because of this line:

Campbell’s impact on our field will never be truly extinquished (alas), but

Yep. And all the moderates, conservatives, libertarians, and old-school liberals in the field are part of the “misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF” too. Who’s the fascist again?

That’s about as far into politics as I care to go. I know you probably aren’t into science fiction for the politics, but if you want to read a more detailed fisking of this ridiculous article, you can find it on my blog. In the meantime, I’ll be back to more important things, like writing.

Thoughts on Clean Reader

cleanreaderIn case you haven’t heard, there’s a new app in the book world that is stirring up quite a bit of controversy. It’s called Clean Reader and it basically goes through an ebook and filters out the profanity, with settings for “clean,” “cleaner,” and “squeaky clean.” It was designed by the parents of a teenager who expressed dismay at finding profanity in an otherwise clean book.

The response from authors has been vociferous. Chuck Wendig (WARNING: Chuck uses so much profanity, he probably deserves a Clean Reader filter setting of his own) predictably came down hard against it, as well as Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat. Over on KBoards, there’s an ongoing thread of indie authors slamming it as a denial of artistic expression, as a copyright violation, as malicious censorship—basically, the whole gamut. Interestingly, though, Cory Doctorow came out in defense of it.

Personally, this app reminds me a lot of CleanFlicks, a movie rental place here in Utah that edited out objectionable content such as sex, violence, and profanity. I watched the edited version of Zombieland while I was in college, and while I enjoyed it, it was… short. CleanFlicks did a lot of business, right up until the US Supreme Court shut it down.

While I can see why some writers would hate this app, I actually sympathize more with the readers. Living in Utah, I know a lot of people (some of them in my own family—hi Kate!) who are exactly the kind of people for whom Clean Reader was made. And much like Cory Doctorow, I think that their right to control their own reading experience trumps the writer’s right to freedom of expression.

The act of reading is fundamentally a collaborative experience. Until someone opens a book and reads it, that book is just symbols on a page, or bytes of data on a storage device. Meaning is only generated through the act of reading—in a very real sense, the story is created by the reader just as much as by the writer. As much as we writers like to think of ourselves as free to write whatever we want, without readers, that freedom counts for very little. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

A lot of writers are making fun of Clean Reader on the basis that the very premise is flawed—that filtering out profanity won’t do anything to clean a fundamentally dirty story. But while that’s true of some books, I do think there’s a middle ground where the app can give some value.

For example, my first novel Genesis Earth is a mostly clean science fiction adventure romance with a few tense moments where the characters use a mild level of profanity. As a writer, it didn’t feel right to have my characters say “darn” instead of “damn,” or “crap” instead of “shit.” Sanitizing the book on that level would have kicked most readers right out of the story. But if a reader who is sensitive to that use of language wants to read a filtered version of Genesis Earth, the story is not going to be fundamentally changed by filtering out those words.

Probably the biggest objection to Clean Reader is that it enforces or promotes a censorship regime that many writers find objectionable. Of course, most of the people who make that argument probably have no idea what “censorship” really entails, just like the people who throw out accusations like “socialist,” “sexist,” “racist,” etc. But putting that can of worms aside, is it right for people to use apps like this—say, parents of young children—to control what other people read?

I am a diehard libertarian, but I actually think that beneath a certain age, parents do have a right to censorship. As legal guardians of their children, parents have a right and a responsibility to raise them as they see fit. If you don’t allow parents to censor what their children are exposed to, then you’re basically saying that society as a whole should raise them, or (God forbid!) the government. I think that’s a horrible idea. Children should be raised by the people who are closest to them, and responsible parents/guardians should be free to raise their children as they (and only they) see fit.

So I’m actually rather supportive of the Clean Reader app. I personally wouldn’t use it, either for myself or for my children, but if other readers do then I have no objection to that. Writers should be free to write whatever they want, and readers should be free to read whatever they want, however they want to read it.

O is for Online Presence

When you’re an indie author, your business exists almost exclusively on the internet. Chances are that ebook sales make up the bulk of your revenue, and those are entirely online. And without the backing of a major publisher, you probably aren’t going to get many books into bookstores (although it is possible). Most of your print sales are going to be online as well.

So if the bulk of your business is online, it only makes sense that you should maintain an online presence or persona of some kind. But what sort of presence should this be? Do you need to be on social media, even if you don’t really enjoy it? What about blogging? What are the dos and don’ts of maintaining an online presence?

Honestly, I don’t think it really matters which platforms you use to build your online presence, so long as you’re accessible in some way. Marketing gurus say that you have to be on social media, but my Star Wanderers books took off when I was living in a developing country with very limited internet access, and hardly ever posted to Facebook or Twitter at all. Even now, my Facebook author page is kind of a ghost town–I post links to each blog post, and I respond whenever a fan drops in with a comment, but that’s about it.

In my opinion, the most important thing to keep in mind when building an internet presence is to do the things that feel the most genuine and authentic. Facebook has never felt very authentic to me, except when I’m interacting with people I know in real life. Twitter, though, had an in-the-moment format that I really enjoy. Even then, I don’t feel nearly as authentic on Twitter as I do on my own blog, where I can post my thoughts and observations without restriction. For that reason, the core of my online presence is my blog, and I use my social media accounts to funnel people here rather than using social media as an end destination.

Besides being authentic, I think it’s important to be gracious to your fans and to not insult or repel them. A handful of authors (such as John Scalzi and Larry Correia) have developed personas that are highly opinionated, controversial, and crude, but they do it in such a way that it draws a following and keeps them. You don’t have to be liked by everyone–indeed, if you’re being authentic you certainly won’t–but you need to be careful to show respect and basic decency toward your fans. They are your bread and butter, and if they find your online behavior repulsive, you’re going to have a very hard time making and keeping them.

When it comes to politics and religion, I try not to be too divisive. Those are certainly important parts of my life, so it wouldn’t be very authentic of me to ignore them completely, but I don’t want my political opinions or religious beliefs to get in the way of my fans enjoying my stories. I don’t write stories just for Mormons, or just for libertarians, or just for white men–I write stories for people who look up at the stars and wish that they could go there. For that reason, I try to be mindful that the people who enjoy my stories might not (indeed, certainly do not) all look or act or believe like I do. I may disagree with them on some issues that I personally find important, but I don’t have to let that come between them and my stories.

The author-reader relationship is a fascinating thing that I have much still to learn about. Right now, my approach is basically to keep from getting in the way as much as possible. Occasionally I’ll get a piece of fan mail that will gush about something they loved about a story but criticize something they didn’t. I never argue back against it, since arguing isn’t going to change the experience they had when they read the story. Instead, I thank them as graciously as I can for reading.

My goal as an author is to stay out of the way of my readers enjoying my stories. For those who do enjoy the stories and want to connect with me, I write author’s notes at the back of all my books and keep an online presence on my blog where they can reach me. But if they don’t want to do that, that’s fine too. I try to be as authentic as I can without alienating anyone who enjoys my stories, and the key to that is to always be grateful for my readers. Writers may create stories, but readers bring them to life, since without anyone to read them, stories are basically dead.

“Who would have thought…”

I would like to address this post to my fellow Mormon readers.

A couple of days ago, I got a discouraging message from some old mission friends of mine.  It said, more or less: “who would have thought that the missionary that taught us the gospel would write such a lurid book?” They were referring to my latest release, Sholpan.

To be honest, it’s been very difficult for me to publish it, because I knew that this sort of thing would happen.  I worry that my friends and family will think that I’ve done something inappropriate, or violated some moral standard, or made myself unworthy in some way.  It’s very difficult to put your writing out there under normal circumstances, much less with complications like these.

However, I would like you to know that I have prayed about this, and that the answer I’ve received is that this is a story worth telling.

Sholpan is about a girl who lives essentially LDS moral standards and falls into what may be the worst situation any of us could imagine for such a girl: slavery in the harem of a powerful warlord who has the power not only to rape her, but to kill her.  By refusing to compromise her values–and risking death to do so–she makes friends in unexpected places and gains a whole lot more power than she ever would have if she’d taken the easy path and compromised.

In other words, it’s a little bit like the story of Esther.  Yes, there are sexual themes, but they aren’t there to be gratuitous or titillating; they’re there to show that even in the face of such horrible immorality, you don’t have to compromise your values.

I know this kind of story isn’t for everyone, which is why I’ve put up warnings in the book descriptions and made it abundantly clear that this book has adult content.  And if you decide you don’t want to read it, I won’t be offended at all.  But please, don’t assume that I’ve gone off the deep end or betrayed my faith, because that’s not the case at all.

It’s a difficult position to be in; I’m sure that Stephanie Meyer’s and Orson Scott Card’s bishops get a lot of mail from fellow Latter-day Saints who feel that they ought to be excommunicated.  But these are the kinds of stories that I feel driven to write: stories that address difficult moral issues and don’t shy away from portraying evil for what it really is.

I appreciate your concern on my behalf, but my faith and spirituality are still quite strong.  You may or may not believe that after reading my books, but please don’t feel like you have to save me.  The best thing you can do is continue to be a positive influence, and let me be a positive influence for you.