(Nimue)
One of the defences of 'AI' is that artists learn from other artists, writers learn from reading. Therefore (so the theory goes) AI learning by scraping other people's data is just replicating this process. While this is in some ways true, it also misses out so much of the process as to be wrong. I'm going to talk about reading, but I think much the same principles will apply to all kinds of creativity. It's also worth noting that most creators don't simply draw their inspiration from other people who were making the same thing. Art, music, drama, stories, poetry and the rest all impact on all of us no matter what we're intending to make, and we learn from everything we encounter.
Learning from books involves a process of selecting what to read in the first place. Some people only read and write in one genre. This allows them to become experts in the form and to deliver what other readers of the genre might want and expect. However, part of knowing your genre involves knowing what's already been done - what would be a cliche, or too tired an idea to engage readers. Most readers do not want a story that rehashes other stories, they want something that blends the familiar with the new.
The authors I am most loyal to don't write in single genres or stay neatly inside genres. There are more people doing this than there used to be, which pleases me greatly. These are not the kinds of stories you could create by rehashing odd combinations of things that already exist.
For someone who intends to write, reading is often an imaginative engagement with the gaps in a story. We think about the perspectives that are missing, or how we'd have handled the ending differently, or why a scene didn't work the way we would have wanted it to. What authors often take from their reading is the desire to do something very different from what they've read. This is also about the way in which our experiences interact with our reading.
This is where AI falls down. AI does not have childhood memories to draw on. It's father did not read it a highly edited version of The Hobbit where nobody dies. It did not read Robinson Crusoe as a child and then have a radically different experience re-reading it as an adult. An AI has not felt suicidal and found itself empathising with Hamlet. It hasn't had a conversation with someone about how differently King Lear reads once you are a parent. An AI does not go to Thomas Hardy's cottage, or get excited by visiting a location it encountered first in a book and as a consequence it doesn't have the same relationship with a text that a person can. It hasn't borrowed a book because a friend loved it. It hasn't reluctantly read a whole trilogy under pressure from a boyfriend.
Reading isn't something we do in isolation. If it's part of your life, then your life impacts on what you read, and how you read. At this point I've read books probably numbering into the thousands.What I write is not me simply spitting out things I've read. My writing comes from my whole life, all of my experience and feelings. It's that interplay between text and life that makes the writing process possible for me and that results in other people writing things I want to read.
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