I try not to talk about AI so much because honestly I am sick to death of having to hear about AI. I think AI is terrible, and then people are like, āDo you think cameras are terrible? Do you think typewriters are terrible?ā and I have to just be like, I donāt want to have this debate lol I want to spend my lifetime doing better things Ā than debating this lol.
In my line of work, people are obsessed with how AI is going to change all of our lives for the better, and so I have often made myself use AI to try to accomplish some of my tasks, because Iām asked to tell my bosses how Iām using AI. The thing Iāve found is that AI often sounds very good at first, and then I look again and itās nonsense. If you actually think a little bit harder about what AI is saying, most of the time it lacks all meaningful substance. Itās just a string of pretty words that sound like theyāre making some kind of point.
But hereās the thing: I donāt blame AI for this. I blame us. When I first was told to use AI for stuff like drafting my emails, what I mainly realized is that corporate America thinks AI is so great because for many years now theyāve been using a lot of pretty words to mean nothing. For many years now, public statements by corporations simply use the big words of the day to say whatever they think people want to hear and it actually means nothing. For many years now, our bosses have sent us emails that donāt say anything at all. For a lot of years I thought this was my own shortcoming in not speaking corporate jargon well enough. Like, I would understand what āoptimizing synergiesā meant if I was a better corporate person. But in the age of AI what Iāve realized is: it means nothing, and it never did. It just sounded good and important. Corporate Americaās obsession with AI has made me realize that they never found the words they were using to be meaningful, so theyāre totally fine with letting computers choose the words. AI is a āgreat accomplishmentā because weād already stopped demanding communicative meaning from others. Weād already started pretending that meaningless words meant things. I think that way when people suggest having AI redraft your resumes for you. Sure, itāll put it in all the popular buzzwords, and none of those will communicate anything about what you actually know how to do. Weāre all just playing this fake game with each other. The tragedy isnāt AI, the tragedy is we let things get to this point where thatās what we were doing in the first place. Itās true, the AI chatbots that companies try to use are terrible at resolving my issuesā¦ā¦.but the companies were terrible at resolving my issues before the AI, too. Itās true, the students are using it to cheat. But we were letting students write bad essays before the AI lol
And I feel that way about AI used for writing fiction. Look, I write fiction because I enjoy it. This is why when I go through rough periods like this year has been, itās upsetting to me. Itās like having a cold kind of that you canāt shake. You know when youāre like, āI miss being able to breathe? Will that ever come back?ā I miss the part of myself that has stories in her head. I miss being able to tell a story. Iāve been editing right now to try to rework some stuff to be published, a process I do not enjoy but itās actually been good for me because itās been some light dialogue-writing thatās made me feel like, right, yes, I can do this, Iām good, I still hear the people in my head. Iāve been through periods before where my head felt stuffy, and Iāve always been okay in the end.
Anyway, this is why when people ask me if I use AI to write, Iām like, Why would I do that? Writing is a thing I actually enjoy, why would I want toā¦not do it? And, actually, I love writing and despise editing, and whenever I have AI write something for me (not fiction, for work), I spend so much time editing it that Iām always like, you know, I would rather have just done this from scratch. Sometimes I think the difference between AI-proponents and AI-skeptics is the difference between people who like writing and people who like editing. So, anyway, AI doesnāt interest me as a way to write fiction because I donāt get it. To me, thatās like asking me why I donāt have a robot eat ice cream for me. Like, if itās something you like to do, why would you give it away?
So most of the time the debate around AI in fiction-writing is just not relevant to me. If there are people out there who want to do it, like, I feel really sad for those people because it seems to me that theyāre dedicating themselves to doing something they donāt even like, and capitalism demands that in so many aspects of our lives, why would you do it with your free time, too? (I guess this is also me saying, because maybe people need to hear it? That some people do like writing. Because maybe people assume everyone despises it.) Do I worry that people who write AI fiction will make more money than I do off of the āwritingā? Yes, because everyone writing for money is making more money than I do than off of writing lol. Iām okay with that because I opted out of that for myself, but I do admit to still being frustrated sometimes.
But this is why Iām frustrated: https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story
Okay, so. AI can write stories now that people think were written by humans. What I find striking about this account is that they thought the story was good enough written by a human, then when they figure out itās an AI suddenly the characters are thin and the worldbuilding is inconsistent and the emotional moments are flat. To me, I think the problem isnāt with the AI. The problem is we let our standards get this low. Like corporate-speak. Weāve normalized being so bad at writing that AI can so easily trick all of us. Iāve been reading a bunch of books lately, and I try not to be super-mean about them here, because I assume that human writers have worked and labored over those books and I assume that there are some readers out there who really love them. But I have made some complaints, as youāve seen. Thin characters? Inconsistent worldbuilding? Flat emotional arcs? This is an epidemic out there. This isnāt about AI. Or maybe it is, because I have to confess that several times I have been reading books so bad ā characters who make no sense, dialogue that barely qualifies for the word, entire major plot points thrown in pell mell, resolved in a sentence, and then never referred to again ā that I have wondered if they were written by AI. Book after book after book after book I read and it is pretty terrible in all of these aspects. And this is contrasted with the good books I read. Because I do read some. I tell you about them when I do. But so many of them have exactly these problems that they claim is AI. So maybe they all have been written by AI. Or maybe we let standards fall so far ā as writers? As editors? ā that itās all our own fault this is happening. We stopped demanding better use of words from each other, and this is where we ended up.
This is such a rant and I feel so old so let me move away a little bit from that to say that the other thing that terrifies me about this is how they āfigured outā that the writers didnāt actually write the stories: The writers were vague about their process when asked. Lolololol if you asked me how I write, I would answer like Bella Chacha: I had an idea and then I wrote the story. I do not have post-it notes and detailed outlines. The best I could do would be to show them a file that had maybe been open and active for some number of hours (but if itās a short story, I have been known to write one quickly, and indeed much prefer that for a short story, I think it keeps the tone consistent). If they asked me about revisions, I would be like, I donāt make them, I think everything I write is immediately perfect lololololol. I mean, thatās also not entirely true, but my idea of revisions isnāt what theyāre thinking, like, I donāt do real re-writes, Iām more likely to just scrap thirty whole pages and start over, Idk. And then when theyāre like, The author didnāt respond to our edits the way we would expect and just accepted all of them. I tend to do something similar when Iām being professionally edited. It hurts me too much to fight too much about what I wrote. Iām just better off emotionally detaching from the process and accepting all of the edits. I do fight every once in a while but I mainly pick my battles. So itās weird because itās like, if my writing got flagged as being generated by AI, how would I even prove that itās not? Having an idea in your head of how an āauthorā behaves can be its own prejudice.
I donāt have a solution to any of this. If I could go back and get these people just not to invent AI at all, I would. This would be one of my time travel uses lol. But maybe when I say that what Iām really saying is that Iām old and nostalgic and I would go back to my youth. Thatās a fair thing to think about me. But I can also tell you that I have things I love to do and that I still in the modern era do those things that I enjoy and that make me happy. Even when Iām feeling dull and out-of-sorts, I keep writing because it still helps me feel more like me. I hope everyone has those things and doesnāt farm them all out to AI. I think all this AI debate is showing me is that we stopped demanding more from each other. Thatās what makes me so sad ultimately. And thatās what makes AI such a perfect invention for this particular era.
(I didnāt use AI to write this, but how will you ever know????? Lol)
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