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, “Do you think cameras are terrible? Do you think typewriters are terrible?” and I have to just be like, I don’t want to have this debate lol I want to spend my lifetime doing better things 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 I’m asked to tell my bosses how I’m using AI. The thing I’ve found is that AI often sounds very good at first, and then I look again and it’s nonsense. If you actually think a little bit harder about what AI is saying, most of the time it lacks all meaningful substance. It’s just a string of pretty words that sound like they’re making some kind of point.
But here’s the thing: I don’t 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 they’ve 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 don’t 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 “optimizing synergies” meant if I was a better corporate person. But in the age of AI what I’ve realized is: it means nothing, and it never did. It just sounded good and important. Corporate America’s obsession with AI has made me realize that they never found the words they were using to be meaningful, so they’re totally fine with letting computers choose the words. AI is a “great accomplishment” because we’d already stopped demanding communicative meaning from others. We’d already started pretending that meaningless words meant things. I think that way when people suggest having AI redraft your resumes for you. Sure, it’ll put it in all the popular buzzwords, and none of those will communicate anything about what you actually know how to do. We’re all just playing this fake game with each other. The tragedy isn’t AI, the tragedy is we let things get to this point where that’s what we were doing in the first place. It’s true, the AI chatbots that companies try to use are terrible at resolving my issues…….but the companies were terrible at resolving my issues before the AI, too. It’s 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, it’s upsetting to me. It’s like having a cold kind of that you can’t shake. You know when you’re like, “I miss being able to breathe? Will that ever come back?” I miss the part of myself that has stories in her head. I miss being able to tell a story. I’ve been editing right now to try to rework some stuff to be published, a process I do not enjoy but it’s actually been good for me because it’s been some light dialogue-writing that’s made me feel like, right, yes, I can do this, I’m good, I still hear the people in my head. I’ve been through periods before where my head felt stuffy, and I’ve always been okay in the end.
Anyway, this is why when people ask me if I use AI to write, I’m like, Why would I do that? Writing is a thing I actually enjoy, why would I want to…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 I’m 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 doesn’t interest me as a way to write fiction because I don’t get it. To me, that’s like asking me why I don’t have a robot eat ice cream for me. Like, if it’s 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 they’re dedicating themselves to doing something they don’t 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 “writing”? Yes, because everyone writing for money is making more money than I do than off of writing lol. I’m okay with that because I opted out of that for myself, but I do admit to still being frustrated sometimes.
But this is why I’m 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 it’s an AI suddenly the characters are thin and the worldbuilding is inconsistent and the emotional moments are flat. To me, I think the problem isn’t with the AI. The problem is we let our standards get this low. Like corporate-speak. We’ve normalized being so bad at writing that AI can so easily trick all of us. I’ve 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 you’ve seen. Thin characters? Inconsistent worldbuilding? Flat emotional arcs? This is an epidemic out there. This isn’t about AI. Or maybe it is, because I have to confess that several times I have been reading books so bad – 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 – 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 – as writers? As editors? – that it’s 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 “figured out” that the writers didn’t 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 it’s 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 don’t make them, I think everything I write is immediately perfect lololololol. I mean, that’s also not entirely true, but my idea of revisions isn’t what they’re thinking, like, I don’t do real re-writes, I’m more likely to just scrap thirty whole pages and start over, Idk. And then when they’re like, The author didn’t respond to our edits the way we would expect and just accepted all of them. I tend to do something similar when I’m being professionally edited. It hurts me too much to fight too much about what I wrote. I’m 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 it’s weird because it’s like, if my writing got flagged as being generated by AI, how would I even prove that it’s not? Having an idea in your head of how an “author” behaves can be its own prejudice.
I don’t 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 I’m really saying is that I’m old and nostalgic and I would go back to my youth. That’s 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 I’m 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 doesn’t farm them all out to AI. I think all this AI debate is showing me is that we stopped demanding more from each other. That’s what makes me so sad ultimately. And that’s what makes AI such a perfect invention for this particular era.
(I didn’t use AI to write this, but how will you ever know????? Lol)
