I’m going to come right out and say it: I am NOT a fan of AI.
I feel like you are probably subscribed to this newsletter because you care about craft, so I am probably preaching to the choir already, but let’s get into why AI should not be part of your creative process.
Using ChatGPT or any other GPT (generative pretrained transformers) or AI to produce writing is not a creative act. It’s feeding questions and/or keywords into a machine and letting the machine make connections between those keywords to produce something that looks like what you’re asking it for. On the surface, it can look…fine. But look closer, and you’ll find it’s derivative (obviously, since it’s being pulled from already created sources) or just not quite right.
(Have you seen AI art of popular book characters? They are all over my IG Explore page. They might look lovely on first look, but then there’s something uncanny and too polished about them, and they actually have six fingers or unnatural proportions. It just feels fake to me.)
AI does not value art or creativity. We go to museums to marvel that a human hand and a human brain created the masterpiece we’re staring at; we listen to music to be moved by melodies and emotions; we read books to be transported to new worlds that come out of someone’s beautiful mind. Storytelling is part of being human.* AI doesn’t care about the process of creativity or how it makes its audience feel—but that’s the whole point of any creative endeavour.
(*Let me dork out for a second, because this is the one time very specific information from my forever-unfinished PhD thesis about gossip and Shakespeare is ever going to come in handy: in my research on gossip, I came across this work by an evolutionary psychologist who argued that grooming in primates was a social act that eventually evolved into language and gossip and storytelling. It’s fascinating, honestly. All this to say, storytelling is deeply coded into our DNA as homo sapiens.)
AI gets the data it uses to provide the end product from datasets collected by companies like Google and Amazon and/or from scraping the internet for writing. So this can potentially be copyrighted work or work that no one has given the AI permission to use (like fanfic, for example). It’s not plagiarizing, per se, but it’s using what other people have already thought and created (and maybe not with their specific permission) to spit out something kinda similar. There are a lot of ethical and legal concerns that make using AI particularly fraught right now.
The thing is, AI is basically averaging out all the data it has and predicting what should come next. So what it produces is going to be average. It’s not the product of the human mind noticing something fascinating and then expressing it in a way that creates surprise and delight. It’s giving you what it predicts should follow, so total middle-of-the-road.
But that’s not what you want for your writing. The books that really stand out are the ones that are doing or saying something in a way that feels new and novel. You’re not going to get from an AI. It might be perfectly serviceable prose once you get in there and edit it, but it’s not going to blow anyone away. You’re a writer, and you can do better than a machine that’s only giving you the baseline.
You could get AI to write you a whole book right now if you give it enough information. AIs aren’t sophisticated enough yet to give you 80K words all at once, so you do have to feed it ideas scene by scene. In that respect, there is a human element to the process. And people are already doing this, to give an idea to run with or to get past a block and get some momentum back.
But you can see how this system could be ripe for abuse, especially as AI continues to develop and become more sophisticated. But if you’re a writer, the whole point of writing is to get something out of your head that only youcan express—it’s not to get a machine to do that work for you. You’re not writing because writing is easy to do—if it was always easy, you probably wouldn’t bother to do it because you’d be bored! It’s the challenge, the actual brainwork that makes it something worth doing.
Why would you want to be a writer if you’re not actually writing? If it’s for fame or money, good luck—that requires a lot more work than just writing, and you’re not going to get either of those things when you’re producing work that relies on the median. A unique voice and perspective in a messy story is always going to trump a competently written story that doesn’t bring anything new to the table. You’re not going to get that voice with a GPT.
AI is a tool of late-stage capitalism. It’s much faster for companies to chuck something into a machine than to pay people a living wage to create something new and different that hasn’t been tested to know if it’ll be profitable or not. We live in an era where there are constant reboots and remakes of TV shows and movies because nostalgia sells and it’s less risky than a new piece of media that could make them millions of dollars…or could lose them millions of dollars. But then when one of these new movies/shows hits different and does something innovative, it feels so fresh and exciting.
And look, I fully believe that we’re always telling the same stories over and over again—there are just new perspectives on them as humanity continues to develop. And in romance especially, where we’re often accused of this, we just keep configuring our building-block tropes in inventive ways that make things interesting. But with AI, these stories will become tired and clichéd because they're just recycling these old ideas and not coming up with those new perspectives.
At the moment, I’m not particularly worried about AI taking over publishing or putting writers or editors out of work. (So, like, the opposite of this guy.) AI is too clunky and too unrefined right now to replace actual humans. But we’re on a precipice, I think, and I would rather not feed the beast.
AI is all around us and is practically unavoidable (Google auto-filling for you when you go to search for something? AI. Even my social media marketing service just introduced an AI that can write your posts for you, which actually feels a bit...creepy to me), but I’m committed not using AI to actually create anything—all my words in my newsletter, my posts, my work all come from my brain, not from a machine.
If you care about craft and creativity, I hope that you as a writer can similarly commit to not using AI to create, in solidarity with other creatives whose livelihoods may be threatened by AI (for example, artists who aren’t getting paid when people can just generate a relatively realistic AI image). This also means not letting anyone else on your team use AI—for example, cover designers using AI-generated images, or VAs using AI to write posts for you).
What do you think of AI? Do you see its potential, or do you fear our robot overlords? Let me know in the comments!