The AI Of It All
Another day, another article about how ‘helpful’ AI is for writers. These articles are always the same. People who claim to be writers talk about how they ‘just use AI for ideas’ or use it to ‘enhance or expand their work.’ The problem is that using AI for any aspect of your writing sees you sitting at the top of a slippery slope.
The article which has sparked this side quest rant is from Wired, and while it is unfortunately behind a paywall, a few quotes from it are enough to see the bleakness of the picture. These are apparently actual quotes from actual ‘writers’ which they were happy to share, so remember that this is the amount of AI use they are prepared to publicly admit to.
“I’ve always hated the zero-to-one process of writing a story… Now, it’s actually kind of fun. Going out on my own, I realized I need AI to help with the volume.”
So, in other words, you don’t like writing and can’t meet deadlines without using AI to ‘help with the volume’? At minimum this is likely to be extending a human written article, but more likely it’s just getting the bare basics down, then using AI to actually produce the content. Later in the article the writer says:
“I feel like I’m cheating in a way that feels amazing.”
It feels like cheating because it is. Writing has always been an art, and AI is taking that away. Dictionary.com defines art as including but not limited to:
- The creation of works of beauty or other special significance.
- The exercise of human skill.
- The products of man’s creative activities.
- To become highly proficient at something through practice.
AI use undermines all of this. Writing is not a human skill, and is not a creation of man (or woman) if you use a machine to generate it. There are those who argue that is a ‘creation’ but I dispute this. Writing a prompt is a skill, but it’s one that in writing you would normally use to spark an idea. You can search for writer prompts and find thousands of ideas, but the aim is for them to spark your creativity, not to be fed into an automated system.
Not only does AI generate writing with no heart or soul, due to not having either*, but it’s also notoriously unreliable. So much so that even Wikipedia has banned its use. You can’t trust it to be accurate, and it doesn’t have the nuances humans have. If you hear the argument that a writer, and I use the term loosely, has ‘trained the AI’ then often this is worse as it’s likely been trained using the copyrighted works of authors who did put the work in to produce art.
Art is beautiful because it’s unique to the person who creates it, and is perfected through practice over time. AI will never be able to give you something truly unique because by design it replicates that which has been fed into it. Art is about the process as much as the product and the process isn’t for everyone and that’s ok.
I really hate maths. I find equations confusing, formulas baffling, and the only exam I’ve ever failed in my life was about statistics. As much as I find it satisfying to solve a maths issue, I hate every second of trying to work it out. This is why I have never attempted to become an accountant or some other similar job. Likewise, if you hate the process of writing then simply choose a career that doesn’t involve writing.
Humans are wonderfully unique and as such we should be tapping into our strengths rather than taking shortcuts to try and cover our weaknesses.
Before I took the creative writing course I struggled with ideas, but there are solutions which don’t involve AI.
Use idea generation techniques like mind mapping to organise a seed of an idea into a broader one.
Write down anything that comes into your head then challenge yourself to craft an idea from it.
Use writing prompts – Most writers create these to help others.
Use Story Cubes or similar to spark ideas.
You don’t need AI to write. Excellent novels, articles, reviews, analysis and many other forms of writing all existed long before AI technology. Give your soul to your art, not to an algorithm which corporate fat cats are hoping will replace you and do your work for free.
Art is human.
*If AI does have a soul these days then we have much bigger problems.