A friend sent me this mention of my work in a Guardian article by Van Badham, via the 2023 Newsweek piece that is still perennially making the rounds:

I’m one of the thousands of Australian and other writers dependent on royalty cheques to pay phone bills who learned last year that their work had been hoovered up to train AI models for Meta (market cap: US$1.28tn) and other mega corps for less remuneration than a kid pays to photocopy one page of it at the library. None of us got a dollar while a wave of AI-ghostwritten self-publishers announced their arrival into our crowded, poor and tiny market. This was (and I did not need a computer to tell me this) discouraging.

Still not sure why, of all the supposedly millions of people globally using generative AI products, that everyone sees fit to single me out as the bad guy?

I’m also not sure calling my work “AI-ghostwritten” is accurate, given that even in that article, I say that I use AI. It’s not somehow hidden. And does one article about one guy constitute many “publishers” announcing themselves? I don’t think so.

I do, however, basically agree with Badham’s concluding remarks in the article:

Yet I’ve decided not to be an AI doomer. I can proselytise its usefulness in my own life while fighting for its aggressive regulation. Melvin Kranzberg states: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” It will be as moral as we choose to make it.

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