Here's K.Badenoch, who thinks an autism diagnosis entails "economic advantages and protections". She also queries providing school transport for autistic kids & has no idea what neurodiversity/divergence are, and why they have abs nothing to do with, say, anxiety. Pls repost

My difficulty here (i.e. my inarticulateness) is that I actually agree with an awful lot of what you're saying. I'm not really trying to disagree with you much. I'm also not really trying to be an AI advocate. I'm more trying to say "I don't think I'm 100% purist on this stuff. It's a bit fuzzy."

also b) I absolutely agree that some consideration of what went before is important. But at what point in the process does that have to come in? Can't it happen after the half-way point, where an artist is struck by some input, gnaws it over, then makes it their own.

> Think it's the intention and thought that matters I dunno. a) I remember when (long ago!) I tried my hand at submitting to magazines, an editor patiently explained to me that it didn't really matter what was happening in my head. It mattered what was on the page and what the reader thought.

"Pearl Earring." Dear me. Anyway, my main point was in reply to the OP, where I was struck by "I have no idea how ..." I was trying to say, "It may be hard to know, because it seems to be a career ender to have the conversation." I do think fully AI story submissions are awful though.

Honestly, I don't know If a band covers a song, they've taken something someone else made. But they've added creativity of their own. Authors rewrite shakespeare. Artists redo the Pear Earing. Some covers can be better than the original. I don't know if art needs to be wholly original end to end.

But I think a lot of the AI debate is impossible to extricate from the copyright issue. Rightly, maybe. But there are two strands here I'm not sure of: a) Is AI ethical in general b) Does a creative work need to be "purely self generated" in some way. I think a lot of arguments conflate the two

I'm not sure how much difference there would have been if the author had wandered lonely as a cloud and run into a museum followed by a pokemon tournament. Or if they'd asked AI for two terrible ideas. Again, I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I remember a post a while ago by Jim Butcher, in which he pointed out that it wasn't the idea that made a story, but the delivery. Someone took him up in the forum and suggested the collision of two ideas that seemed awful together (lost legion + pokemon) - and he got a book series out of them.

One of the difficulties, I think, is that it's very unpopular to be the voice of "I use AI" in the creative industries. Which I'm not saying makes it right to use AI. I actually don't know where any line should be drawn. But it does make it hard to have an open conversation about it.