As with any new technology, we all have to take a stand, and mine is that I will never feed you AI content slop under my name, be it via a chatbot-wra

Should you sell your words to AI? - by Arnold Kling

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-30 18:00:04

As with any new technology, we all have to take a stand, and mine is that I will never feed you AI content slop under my name, be it via a chatbot-wrapper with my photo on it on some other platform, nor here on Substack, nor in my books. My writing will always be the authentic me… I believe the broadcast-based connection between the consciousness of the writer and the reader is a sacred trust, I’m honored it exists between me and so many people, and I don’t plan on swapping it out with an artificial replacement.

He describes how a company came to him with a proposal that he lend his name and some content to a book club that would be led by a chatbot. He could choose the book, provided that it was a classic. The company would be honest about saying that it was marketing a book club that was not going to be led by Erik, but by a chatbot trained by Erik.

I think that this is a clever idea. As some of you may remember, I briefly tried to create an AI “clone” on my economic writing. What disappointed me was not the fidelity of the clone to me but the opposite. That is, when asked a question about an economic issue on which I disagree with mainstream economists, the chatbot too often would give the mainstream answer instead of mine.