AI Is Not To Be Feared
Unless we act in stupid ways
I see a lot of kerfuffle (always wanted to use that word) on Substack about the use — or non-use — of AI in writing. People taking pledges not to use AI, or people taking pledges not to read anyone who uses AI. You know, the usual calm, reflective discussions between reasoning adults…
What I am going to argue here is that this fear or loathing of AI is misplaced. I will discuss several arguments against AI, and then why I disagree.
AI Is Dangerous
Only if you do stupid things with it. I mean, if you put it in charge of the nuclear arsenal, you get what you deserve. Or if you ask it to identify a movie based on a plot point you give it, and you take its first answer and put it on a test, and you get the test wrong, you get what you deserve.
AI is a tool. Large Language Models (LLM) is a technique. The good part of LLM is it gathered the world’s knowledge. The bad part of LLM is it gathered the world’s knowledge. So yeah, it has all the right information, as well as all the wrong information. Using rules, it is trying to differentiate between right and wrong, but the guardrails being installed are being installed by biased humans, so um, yeah.
But as long as you view it as just a tool — and not an all-knowing oracle — you’ll be fine.
AI Will Replace Writers
No, it will not. Full stop. You know how I know this? Because writers can never be stopped from writing. Oh, but you say, publishers will just use AI-generated copy to save money! Sure, that will happen. But you know how I know it will never replace you or me?
Let’s say AI gets to the point where it’s as good a writer as Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway:
Wow, how could we ever compete against that?!
The same way writers who lived during Twain’s and Hemingway’s era still wrote despite competing against some of the best writers in history! So if AI ever gets that good, and it’s not there yet, you will still have the ability to write. Maybe the lazy and greedy publishers (wait, is that a redundancy?) will take the easy way out, but that will just leave the smart publishers to zig in a different direction and pick our manuscripts.
AI Has No Creativity
Uh, no, that’s not true, but to understand this, we have to think about where our creativity comes from. When I wrote Tranith Argan, it was because I had read Tolkien, loved it, but wished it were different in a few ways, and decided to write my version of fantasy that “corrected” those ways.
In other words, my creativity was to read someone else, then write a variation of that.
That’s exactly what AI does. It reads the world’s literature, sees the common structures of, say, a romance novel, and then when asked to write a new romance novel does a variation of what it read and analyzed.
But AI Has No Soul!
True. That’s one advantage we have and always will. AI does not innately understand emotion. In that, it is like a severely autistic person. It sees emotion among writing, but cannot perfectly relate to it in any way. But it can copy it! It can see what those emotional humans think is important, and copy that. It’s only a copy, and we think it could never move our spirits, but I think the first time it writes about a kitten being pulled from a burning house, our hearts will be in our throats as we read what AI wrote.
Frankly, it’s not that hard to copy emotions, even if you don’t feel them yourself.
AI Produces Garbage
Yes, sometimes. But less than it used to, and it keeps getting better. But you know what is not garbage? Asking it to find useful stuff.
For example, if you want to find the telephone number for Amazon customer service, you could go on Amazon.com and find the Contact Us link, and wade through lots of text designed to get you not to call — or you could just ask ChatGPT to find it for you, and it will.
Or you could ask it to find typos in your copy. You certainly want to get the stupid typos out of the way before you send it your human editor, right? Then she can focus more on the structural parts of your story. AI is very good at basic grammar rules, finding all those mistakes you could never find no matter how much you looked.
I Will Never Use AI!
You already are, you just don’t know it. Every time you take a photo with your phone, it uses AI. Every time you write in a text editor, it’s using AI to check for mistakes. Your car uses AI to check for dangerous conditions. AI is already embedded in all our devices in ways you didn’t realize. You use AI!
AI is a tool like any other. Use it right, it does the job. Use it wrong, it misleads you. But you don’t need to take a vow against it. Don’t want to use it? Don’t. But don’t look down on those who use it to look things up or find obvious typos. It’s just a tool.
Just don’t produce text and pawn it off as your own writing. That’s misattribution! Be honest about your use of tools.
I mean I use it to help with my Grammar and spelling, but that's it really. It's the Art side that's most upsetting. AI could be so helpful but it seems to be used for entertainment instead, such a waste.
Individual writers might be able to use AI as a tool. Corporate American, however, will use it to wipe out jobs. Yes, we can all still be hobbyists, but even those of us who are often like to dream of making some money doing what we love.
As for all of us using AI, I think it's a mistake to equate things like spell check with AI. They existed before AI as we know it now even existed.
As far as AI being creative and the comparison to human processes, the difference is that we have life experience which influence how we are inspired by various stimuli to create things. AI can be trained on the stimuli, but it has no life experience to add to the mix. It can create the illusion of creativity, but it's process is really not that similar to what humans do. (AI requires huge piles of material to be able to master language, for example, for more than what humans need to master reading and writing. It's just not the same thing.