I’m sure you know my feels on this whole A.I. thing.
(and you know I’m not 100% against A.I. / LLMs / Tools)
If you use them ethically and within the bounds of our own human sanity that’s cool…
Most of us don’t wanna spend hours going through data and spreadsheets and all of that boring shit. We’d rather do the creative stuff that sets our souls on fire.
I mean… I’d rather write some sci-fi-zombie-space-erotica than crunch numbers, but if you get off of numbers and data. Then who am I to kink shame you eh?
Anywho.
As someone who pens an obnoxious amount of words in notebooks by my own hand or lays in the bath while writing an email with my thumbs…
Who often second guesses whether or not to hit send and then move on with my life.
You often get to a place where you think to yourself how do you “stand out” when everyone is doing the same thing. So you just do the thing and somehow, even if its hard. Your voice or style or secret sauce starts to shine…
However. When stupid shit like this happens in an article that has this headline:
“Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer’s Style”
The genuine folk who love their craft and spend months and even years penning a novel have to suffer with the rest of the world who now have a knee jerk reaction and call everything A.I. – Well… A.I. when the find your work.
It sucks but hey, what are we gonna do about it? (How to A.I. proof YOU will be a topic of another email though)
Now to the uninitiated.
If you’ve ever messed with any form of A.I. you can basically ask it to write or re-write something in whatever style you want. Well, that is if these tech knobs have rightfully stolen the IP of your favourite author and fed it into their very own theftbox-LLM. (They have just FYI)
And as soon as you hit ENTER. You drop a quick little prayer and hopefully it’ll vomit out something that sounds like something your favourite author would’ve written.
After that. You can then claim it as your own prettied up word vomit and post it on social media.
But what happens when you’ve accidentally left the output of your favourite GPT in your published novel?
Well. I can tell you that it’s not gonna be a fun experience. You are going to destroy EVERY bit of credibility and love of your audience because of it.
I get that we’re lazy as shit and it’s in our nature to find shortcuts and hacks and shiny objects that’ll make our lives easier. So we can continue to sit on the couch and doomscroll until our eyes glaze over, but there’s one thing we need in this world and that is trust and credibility.
This whole being a writer/artist stuff isn’t easy. That’s why not everyone wants to do it. It takes years of dedication and sacrifice to “git gud” as the kids would say.
It’s how these grifters keep grifting. By selling you on this magical robot that’s going to make your life so easy.
In the short term it might. But what they don’t tell you is that when you’re turning your brain off by not learning and challenging yourself. You will eventually become sad and miserable and find the stuff you’ve loved to do just vanish.
That’s the type of burn out you won’t come back from.
Novelty is always cool, but when it fucks with your own brain soup. You need to know when to opt-out.
I’m off to go A.I. proof by brain by reading some sci-fi-zombie-space-erotica.
If that’s not your thing. Here’s the link to that article if you want to give it a little read.
Stephen Walker