Yeah, I will be writing new material on this soon. Have had some predictions of my own I was waiting to see play out. Thanks for the thoughtful comment!

Ironically, ChatGPT once flattered me with this description of my librarian-learned skills: “Librarians aren’t trained to be walking encyclopedias—they’re trained to be reliable navigators of uncertainty. That’s a very different skill. A good librarian isn’t the person who has all the answers; they’re the person who knows how to find the best answer, evaluate it, and recognize when the available information is incomplete or contradictory.”

We don’t evaluate information anymore. And as AI continues to learn, it’s going to get harder and harder to distinguish computer-generated from real. That’s just going to speed up the dumbing-down of humanity.

I use AI to check for typos, grammar glitches, etc. I think that is a great use for AI (and yes, spellcheck and Grammarly and all that count as AI).

And I HATE that! Because it makes everyone suspicious of creatives. The frigging EM DASH is a great example. Go look through my posts. I have almost 20 years of articles on-line and you can see I LOVE the em dash…but so does AI. Now, every time someone sees an EM DASH, they roll their eyes and go, “Must be AI” OR they are at least suspicious.

We have enough BS that rips people out of the fictive dream without this nonsense.

GURL! If you lived next door we’d get nothing done, LOL! Or we would just have the most AWESOME writing group…ever! Yeah I use it for that and, as you know, I will feed work through to look for typos, grammar, repetitive words and any obvious problems…but I FIX THOSE.

And thanks for the confidence boost. I was worried no one really wanted to hear anything more about AI.

I did find that it helped me with plot ideas, but I’m careful to make the plot my own. If I lived next door to Kristen Lamb, I’d just come over, sit around the table and plot a novel in an hour. Really… who needs AI when you have Kristen1

Assistive AI can be helpful. It’s just like asking someone nearby, “How do you spell thorough?” Or looking up a word in the dictionary. I learned at two to recognize words by sight as well, especially since I have synesthesia. I can typically tell if a word is spelled right because of the “colors” in it. The main problem with AI is that people ask it to write something, quote it, and don’t use their own imagination to write. That’s Generative AI. It generates all the text (or art or music) and people put their name on it.