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.

What’s the point? I ask. OK, I know. Money, duh. Churn out the genre fiction, overwhelm with volume, make a decent living. But what I meant by “what’s the point?” is what you were talking about in your brilliant post. They’re no longer writers. They are, at best, producers of soulless, terrible-to-mediocre books. I recently read Sue Monk Kidd’s Writing Creativity and Soul. An inspiring work about how hard it can be to write, and how rewarding. These AI book producers are not writers, and they’ll never understand what it means to reach deep down and use your own human experience to create something unique.

On the other side, the readers. I think… if they find an “author” they like, who is putting up an entire series every month of five books or releasing books every other day, I think they have to know what they’re getting. And if they enjoy it, the way some people will eat overly sweet, chalky, all but tasteless chocolate, then I say, let them enjoy these books. But these readers will never find a spark of creative brilliance in these books because that’s not what these book producers are even trying for. The rest of us will continue to enjoy smooth, creamy chocolate with depth and different flavor notes, and search for writers with something to say. That’s my hope, anyway. Trying to be positive in an industry I’ve been in all my adult life from non-fiction researcher to editor to writer.