To be honest, the only change to my life as a writer that AI has brought about is that I now add the stipulation along with my copyright notice in the front of every book published that my work may not be used to train AI.
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I wonder how many people understand how AI learns how to write, or how to create art in any form. For those who don’t know, AI learns how to write through internet crawlers that copy billions of words without licenses or permissions. That means, AI is stealing from work previously created by a human. When a live person does this, we call it plagiarism and it’s punishable under the law. In a school or college setting it can net you a flunking grade. Yet it’s okay for AI to do so? I beg to disagree.
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Writing is at once, an adventure and a slog. An adventure that inspires our creative side. Or a slog that can often inspire an author to decide it’s time to go clean the mudroom, mow the lawn, or fold laundry. We’ve created a term for this stall – it’s called writer’s block. So, along comes AI in the form of apps like ChatGPT, Bing and others, that will do the slog for us. AI is meticulous about the rules for writing that we had to learn the hard way and still often transgress. And because AI has scrolled through billions of already written documents, it only requires a few hints to be typed in, and off it goes to create something new. Or is it new? I contend that it is not new since it has just reworked what someone else wrote.
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AI can even write poetry, create new images of things that never existed, or paint pictures. But the one thing it struggles with is innovation. It also cannot feel, think or empathize. These deficits leave the writing somewhat bland and devoid of emotion. The whole point of reading for pleasure is to become immersed in the lives of the characters, both good and evil, and caring about what happens to them. If the characters don’t leap off the page and grab your heart, where is the pleasure? Or the reward?
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For years I’ve picked up books with a great blurb and a teasing premise, only to be completely turned off by a lack of editing. Sometimes so off-putting that I’ll toss the book aside unfinished. Now I have to wonder, if I find an equally appealing blurb and then discover there is no emotional connection, will I have wasted yet more of my limited income?
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Our literature reflects who we are as a culture, as a people, as a country and society. If AI becomes the only source of reading material, will we simply be conforming to the past and never growing into the future? Our knowledge and how we lived in 1225, or 1525 is vastly different than 2025 and our literature reflects that. As an example, if AI learned all it knows from work written long before the Civil War, slavery might still be viewed as an acceptable norm. Even as recently as the middle of the last century would have us stuck in a world where woman either were housewives and moms, or never married and went to work as teachers and nurses. We’ve come a long way in both those areas and our literature mirrors that.
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AI does have a place in our world. Reports, and instruction manuals, daily ledgers and so many other things are great examples of places where AI can save a lot of time and effort and still produce easily digested information. Yet, as an author, I see the speed with which AI can create literary works (I use that term literary in the loosest possible terms) to compete with human authored work as a serious threat to human writers, both economically and culturally.
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Personally, I won’t be resorting to ChapGPT or similar apps to help me write. I’ll tough out the slog part of writing and continue to hone my work manually. I’ll be as excited about my characters and their growth as I hope my readers will be. As a reader, I definitely will never waste what precious time I have left in life on a heartless, uninspiring novel created by an AI bot with no ability to think, feel or emote. Reading is meant to be an adventure and I enjoy it being an adventure when I'm writing, too.
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Now that I’ve had my say on the subject, you might like to see how my fellow Round Robin Blog Hoppers view or use AI in their writing.
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AJ MaGuire
Connie Vines
Helena Fairfax
Bob Rich
