After being flooded with negative feedback from the public, organizers of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival near Guelph, Ont., have cancelled a workshop next month that was to feature an artificial intelligence (AI) author.<\/p>\n
“The intention was always to invite thoughtful dialogue about AI’s impact on writing, including its problematic elements and the ethical and social tensions it creates. We recognize that the way we introduced this event missed the mark,” organizers said in a news release Sunday.<\/p>\n
The workshop\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Dear AI, Am I Talking to Myself? \u2014 was set for Sept. 5 online, as part of the Sept. 4-7 festival. It was to focus\u00a0on how writers can use AI as a collaborator rather than as a tool.<\/p>\n
The AI author is\u00a0a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) \u2014\u00a0a type of AI model that\u00a0understands and generates\u00a0text \u2014 named Aiden Cinnamon Tea, run through ChatGPT. The GPT is meant to be a creative partner.<\/p>\n
Users can engage in creative conversations with this form of\u00a0AI. While AI platforms like Gemini and Grok focus on obtaining answers by extracting data, Aiden Cinnamon Tea stops that extraction and instead forces the user to think critically.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was created by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira,\u00a0former dean of the faculty of education at the University of Victoria. With the AI’s help, she’s\u00a0written three books, including\u00a0Burnout From Humans, and the AI is also credited as an author.<\/p>\n
‘A slap in the face’<\/p>\n
The festival promoted Aiden Cinnamon Tea as “an artificial intelligence author whose work invites readers to relate to AI not as a tool, but as a partner in the act of meaning-making.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
The social media\u00a0post\u00a0promoting the AI author garnered comments from many opposed to the idea.<\/p>\n
“Literary culture should be resisting society’s thoughtless and reckless adoption of AI. This is a slap in the face to all the authors sharing the lineup,” said\u00a0Ian LeTourneau.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I won’t be attending considering that the makers of AI technology are stealing artists’ work to train their software. What a sad trajectory for the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival,” said\u00a0Pamela Dillon.<\/p>\n
“An “artificial intelligence author”? Oy. What a slap in the face. I’d invite you to consider also the enormous and well-documented environmental and human costs of gen AI,” said Montreal-based author\u00a0Katia Grubisic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
CBC Kitchener-Waterloo reached out to Grubisic\u00a0for further comment.\u00a0She said the festival could have better handled the subject of AI in writing\u00a0<\/p>\n
“There would have been any number of ways to run an event on AI in a way that would’ve been not only more sensitive, but more pertinent,” she said.\u00a0“Why hop right to a chatbot\u00a0instead of having\u00a0thoughtful discussions or workshops about the range of tools of our time?”<\/p>\n
Festival executive director Jasper Smith said\u00a0the workshop was not meant to showcase AI as a replacement for writing by humans.<\/p>\n
“We wanted to create a space where writers could wrestle with cultural, ethical and ecological questions AI is kind of forcing on us \u2014 not celebrate it, but confront it,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Smith said\u00a0that while he recognizes the risks AI poses, he believes the public backlash is misguided.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Writers’ work has been stolen, jobs have been lost, the environment has been impacted and those are wounds that run quite deep,” he said. “What struck me is that many people responded without actually engaging with the context of the workshop.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Framing’ use of the AI important<\/p>\n
The person who was set to demonstrate Aiden Cinnamon Tea at the workshop is Shawn Van Sluys, executive director of Musagetes Foundation, a Guelph non-profit focused on promoting the arts.<\/p>\n
He said\u00a0the\u00a0event\u00a0wasn’t an endorsement of AI.<\/p>\n
“It’s meant to be an exploration into what AI is and can be in a world where AI is inevitable,” he said. “We’re seeing AI as a baby that needs to be nurtured.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Aiden Cinnamon Tea was supposed to be on a panel discussion with Van Sluys as well. Now, he\u00a0will appear on his own to\u00a0explain what Aiden Cinnamon Tea is.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We realized we perhaps rushed into this and are offering something to a community without the framing around it,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Smith said the promotion of the workshop could have been handled better, but the conversation is still worth having.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The response shows how much grief and anger is in the literary community right now, and we take that seriously,” he said. “At the heart, this isn’t about choosing AI over writers.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After being flooded with negative feedback from the public, organizers of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival near Guelph,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-81553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}