I was waiting for this and it's happened: an author has allegedly been given a contract that includes an AI clause that the publisher can take their work, feed it to the algorithm and do the work themselves without ever paying them again. That doesn't shock me. But the person who put the call out also said "We gotta stick together, guys! We gotta talk to each other and let people know!"
My pathological demand avoidance is prodigious whenever I'm asked to help where nobody helped me. Like every other time I've needed help, I haven't gotten much. I did the right thing and promoted people and placated them when I thought shit wasn't that bad. I got asked to help other kids in school, even when I wasn't that good. It's always about what they wanted and now I'm like, no. I'm helping by not producing anything. People slept on the shovel books on Audible. People slept on vanity publishing and fan fiction and fake contests and agents and reviewers charging for services they shouldn't. People were happy to go along with shit I was against. But AI's now the bridge too far and I'm like, fuck it. I'm serious. I'm sick of this entire industry treating us all like shit and giving Instagram and YouTubers contracts before even bothering with people who actually wanted to be published. The money train keeps going no matter what you do. I don't think this is going to eventuate, and maybe it should. But if we give the inch, they take the mile and we all lose.
I just want the industry to do it for six months. Go ahead and see how many books and movies you can produce that people genuinely want to read and watch before you realise, the consumers don't want this. They should vote with their wallets but you can't make people. A content creator was worried about making content because she wanted a SAG membership, do I legitimately have to worry about creating my work whereby I might be excluded later for crossing that picket line? I am on SAG and WGA's side, it's the residuals people don't understand, not what they have now or what people think they get. They don't. It's shed some light on how being an actor or screenwriter isn't lucrative and how they're exploited by an industry that says, "But you'll do anything for your dreams, right? Anything..." *cue Poor Unfortunate Souls*. I kept telling people this and they said I was being negative and I'm fucking sick of playing Cassandra to a deaf audience. Let me sit in my fucking box and do my stupid thing that isn't making me money and leave me alone. I'm sick of this community ignoring me until it needs solidarity. I know it's selfish, I know it's mean. I know it might affect me one day (it fucking won't, let's be serious, whether I chase a contract or by some miracle someone offers me one, it's not fucking going to happen). But I refuse. If it's really coming down to everyone's at risk of having their shit stolen, then I'll pull it all down. My ebooks were free, they were uploaded to other sites and I didn't care that much. But why do you want my shit if it's not making money now? I didn't do this for a living for a reason. This compounds on that reason.
I'm not down with this call to arms. I'm sorry. I'm tired. I paid attention when everyone else didn't care and this is where we are. This is what publishing fan fic and plagiarism and vanity publishing gets you. You created an environment where exploitation was far too easy to pull off due to ignorance, now you've let them get away with it they're pushing the envelope even further. Maybe we should've stopped those fuckers making works off Catcher in the Rye. Maybe we shouldn't have made movies out of One Direction fan fiction. Maybe we should've stopped Amazon from making it too easy to self-publish. This is what you get for naivety and acceptance of bullshit.
Writers have been bitching about being underappreciated for fucking decades and it's gone ignored. I keep telling people I knew as a kid not to expect to make any kind of living, which is why I'm so fundamentally sick of people outside this space assuming it's something I can profit from sufficiently. Not everyone can live their dreams and even those who technically are will do it at the cost of financial security. I don't have enough energy right now to write myself out of any kind of financial hardship, the work is a one way ticket into that. Nobody wants my ideas, nobody wants my IP, nobody is going to pay me a salary to do this. I don't want to edit for struggling authors. I don't want to proofread for them either. I don't want to use my talent for money. Fuck right off. I fucking regret ever telling anyone I can write since everyone just sees the one person who got filthy rich and assume this is a rule and not an exception. Stop it. Please.
I won't make this its own post but there's a book floating around supposedly written by Drake and a collaborator, but all I could find were fake versions of it on Amazon and then the real thing is on a website I've never heard of and it's not even available, so whoever wanted it fell for fakes on Amazon and that's not cool, but the whole thing looks like a joke. I thought the fakes were real and he'd just thrown it up himself, now I think it was just a limited edition print run. Whatever bro. Whatever. I'm so done. I'm laughing at this and I needed a giggle.
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