As a writer, I'm supposed to be totally against the use of artificial intelligence. My fellow writers say I should never use it, play with it, or implement it in any way. I shouldn't even look at it.
In fact, they tell me, if I walk up a flight of stairs backward while holding a candle and say "ChatGPT" three times, he'll appear in the mirror, but I think that's probably Bloody Mary.
Artificial intelligence has a lot of people worried, and with good reason. It's a large computer system that performs jobs that are normally done with human intelligence, like problem-solving, reasoning, and decision-making.
Normally, humans are good at analyzing data and finding trends and patterns, but AI can analyze a lot more data a lot faster and find trends and patterns sooner, which makes it very useful.
"HAL, look at these 7 million lines of code and find the error that's making it crash."
"HAL, analyze these 100 years of weather reports and see if there are any major changes in temperature."
"HAL, analyze these 3,000 cancer studies and tell me what treatments will be the most effective for my patient."
People could do those things, but it would take weeks, months, or even years to figure it all out. But a good AI system could do it in seconds or maybe a few hours. Why would a PhD researcher analyze 3,000 studies by themselves when AI can do it in the same time it takes to berate a grad student?
Another use is Grammarly, a grammar and punctuation checker that uses AI to show that you've forgotten everything about high school English and are completely wasting your time because you'll never finish that novel and why did you even go into writing as a career, you should have just been a claims adjuster.
It also helps me spell "embarrassed" correctly.
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| Bet he can't spell embarrassed either. |
(Seriously, I didn't even spell it right the first time I wrote it there. So, do I need a special degree to become a claims adjuster, or. . .?)
AI can be used in retail to examine a person's frequent shopping habits and personalize their shopping experience, as well as recommend a good addictions counselor. It can detect fraud in a person's finances. And it can help self-driving cars avoid running over pedestrians.
Where AI should not be used is in creative endeavors. That is, don't use AI to write, make art, make music, or create movies. That's stealing work from the actual creative professionals — the writers, artists, musicians, and actors.
Sure, it seems easy. Just type in a couple sentences, and voila! You've created a steaming pile of mediocrity.
"HAL, create a version of Star Wars where Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are portrayed by Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets."
"HAL, rewrite 'Sense and Sensibility' so Colonel Brandon is The Predator and hunts Willoughby to his death."
"HAL, create a version of 'The Greatest Showman' without all the singing."
This is the kind of thing you're not supposed to do with artificial intelligence. It's unethical and sleazy, and honestly, Willoughby wouldn't last for more than ten seconds against the Predator, so the story just isn't believable.
Using AI is considered a cardinal sin in the creative world because we're supposed to work at our art. It takes years to develop, and there's a reason some people are great at it, and others are not. Some people believe that we should suffer for art, which is why there are no good blues musicians from Beverly Hills.
Why should we spend all those years and effort trying to get better at our craft if some jerk with a laptop can replace us and make millions of dollars doing what we barely get paid for? It's one thing to use AI to correct your grammar or even use it to brainstorm ideas. But to create new work and call it your own? That's a line writers should never cross.
All writers understand the sin of plagiarism, and as someone who has been plagiarized by newspaper editors three times, I can say there's nothing more infuriating than learning someone enriched themselves by stealing your work.
This is what AI does: It trains itself on the works and styles of different creative professionals and then reproduces that work in a manner that is almost like the materials it was trained on.
Recently, the book world lost its collective mind when we discovered that Meta, Facebook's owner, had trained its AI on 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers without permission.
They stole the work of millions of authors and researchers so that some 20-year-old could tap a few commands and shout, "Looky, I'm an author!"
Naturally, a class action lawsuit has been filed, and I'm part of it because two of my books were copied, although my first novel was not.
Which means I don't know whether to be relieved or insulted. Should I be glad I dodged that bullet, or should I be offended that they didn't think my book was good enough to steal?
I wonder if ChatGPT has any thoughts; I'll ask the mirror.
Note for the blog: Having said all this, I should point out that I do use artificial intelligence in my copywriting work:
- I rely on Grammarly so much that I pay for the pro package;
- I record interviews with clients and transcribe them with Otter.ai;
- I put those transcripts into ChatGPT and ask it to give me the key takeaways and write an outline based on that. Then I write those articles.
- I use Perplexity.ai as a replacement for Google because it's so filled with ads and sponsored listings that it's just about useless. I'll ask Perplexity to summarize a subject I want to learn about, or ask it to find journals and blogs about a particular subject.
Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.