Why I won’t use AI
(Discussion of this post on Reddit’s r/selfpublish)
Maybe this will sound weird, coming from a sci-fi author. But I refuse to use AI in any form, for writing or for any other creative endeavor. Look at the creepy, humanoid fingers that an AI put on the “border collie author” image that I generated for this post. It’s a crime against art, right? And every time I log into Amazon and browse through the AI-generated wasteland that is my “sponsored results”, I’m reading the literary equivalent of this.
I love how he’s not even looking at the screen. And it’s a dead giveaway that the Mac has a useful number of full-sized USB ports—no real laptop looks like this :)
I want to be a writer, not an editor
AI is great at quickly cranking out glib, plausible-looking text. But the more closely you look at it, the less it hangs together. I don’t want to spend my one, irreplaceable life beating AI output into shape. And AI doesn’t learn from any feedback you give it, so you don’t even get the satisfaction of teaching it to be better, like a real editor would.
The work of a human master rewards study. The more you engage with it, the more you learn, and the more hidden detail and meaning you uncover. AI output isn’t like that. When you generate some statistically-likely sequence of words, derived from all the zillions of words that have ever been written out there, the result appears superficially valid. But it doesn’t reflect any underlying idea that informs and makes sense of the entire work. Reading a work of AI is a hallucinatory experience. It keeps almost coming together, but just when you think you have it, it morphs into something else.
The weirdly elongated muzzle, the reddened sclera giving me the side-eye… this image creeps me out.
I don’t want to break faith with readers
When someone goes online to or to the bookstore to pick out a new book, they need to have confidence that the books they’re browsing are honest attempts to create something that a reader will enjoy. A book made with AI can seem okay for the first few pages, but the further into such a book you read, the more it dissolves into an incoherent mess. Sure, the “authors” of such works can make a few quick bucks this way, fleecing the unwary. But in the process, they’ve made the readers gun-shy, afraid of buying anything new, since any book could turn out to be hard-to-spot garbage.
The use of AI “floods the zone” with stuff nobody wants. Some have suggested that this is not a problem, since the good stuff will rise to the top, and the bad stuff will sink. But that process isn’t free—it sucks up valuable, finite human attention to sort through and make sense of things.
It’s almost worse when it’s more realistic. I have scary-looking doggy nails on fur-covered, humanoid fingers, with a dog’s pastern bone instead of a human wrist.
I want to support creators
I also refuse to use AI to do anything else that’s creative. My book covers? Illustrated by a real live artist, by hand. My proofreaders are humans, and so are my designers. Sure, I might be able to slop something together with AI that passes a quick glance. But the quality’s just not there. And more importantly, I want to help other people create new and wonderful things, not draft off the work of others. AI doesn’t put any new value out into the world. And the presence of AI-generated works dilute the value of everything around them.
I like the delicate pinky on the left paw-hand. I guess I have no thumbs, though?