Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Feather Stone, Kim Lajevardi, Diedre Knight, C. Lee MaKanzie, and Sarah – The Faux Fountain Pen! If you’re a writer and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this awesomely supportive group.
Each month, IWSG asks us an optional question, and this month’s question taps into one of my current insecurities as both a writer and an artist.
Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?
Short answer: no. No, I don’t, and I doubt that I ever will.
Longer answer: a year or two ago, when the AI craze started taking hold, I did experiment with AI a little, just to see what the hype was about. I had an AI generate some Sci-Fi art for me, and I had a different AI rewrite some of my old blog posts. My initial reaction, when I saw the work AI could produce, was “Wow, this is really impressive.” I also thought, initially, “Oh no… this is better than what I can do.”
But as I played with AI more and more, I became less and less impressed with it. Sometimes, it does shockingly good work, but more often it spits out garbage.
More importantly, the AI never (not even once) gave me what I actually wanted. The AI generated Sci-Fi art looked cool, but it wasn’t what I was picturing in my head. Not even close. As for the AI rewritten blog posts, I’ll admit that the AI wrote cleaner, tighter prose than I do. It had this verbally efficient style that many style guides and writing gurus try to teach you. But after a while, all that super clean, super tight writing started to sound very samey. It felt dull and soulless to me.
Also, when I write blog posts about space and science, I’m really trying to express two things: first, my sense of awe and wonder about the cosmos, and second, my hope for humanity’s future out there among the stars. When I let the AI rewrite my blog posts, it repackaged all the space and science facts reasonably well, but any themes of wonder or hope for the future got lost in translation.
I’m still deeply concerned about AI intruding into the domains of art and literature, mainly because so many big players in the tech industry keep insisting that AI can and should be used for these things. But for my own creative process, AI offers me very little. Basically nothing. I do my art and I do my writing because there’s something inside me that I desperately want to express, that I desperately need to express. This thing inside me that I’m trying to express through my art and my writing—no one else can express it for me, not even an AI.
P.S.: Sorry for not being active on the blog this past month. I haven’t been feeling well, but I’m recovering, and I should have more space and science stuff for you in the month to come.
i-love-space.com 
Sorry you haven’t felt well.
AI lacks a soul so it can never replicate the human experience and emotions. So I can see where it would start to feel all the same.
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I heard someone on a podcast call AI a “stochastic parrot,” which is a term I’m starting to really like. There’s some very sophisticated math involved that makes it look intelligent, but ultimately AI is just parroting stuff humans have already said.
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May you soon start feeling some better. Alex is right: the lack of a soul shows.
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I agree. I was impressed at first, but it didn’t take long for the soullessness of those blog posts to show.
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What did Émile Borel say about chimpanzees, typewriters and Shakespeare? I guess if a chimp can do it, AI might… eventually. Try not to let it get you down. 🙂
Anna from elements of emaginette
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Thanks, friend. I hadn’t thought about the chimps with typewriters thing, but that makes sense as an analogy for what AI does.
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I dabble with it with similar feelings to yours. Oddly, you mention the prose are verbally efficient where I often find them rambling and indecisive. AI seems to love lists, too.
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That’s fair. I’ve seen a lot of really bad AI generated text. But when I asked an AI to rewrite my own writing, I did feel like it was a better writer than I am, which stung pretty hard. It probably wasn’t as good as I thought at the time.
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I agree, I find that AI can never capture the soul which living, breathing writers can imbue into their work. There’s just a personal touch from real authors which AI can’t replicate. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been sick. Wishing you a speedy recovery!
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Thank you! I’m getting there.
Someone on a podcast called AI a “stochastic parrot,” which I quite like as a term. They’re very sophisticated in some respects, but ultimately they’re as intelligent as parrots, just repeating stuff they got from their training data.
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I’ve missed your posts. Good to hear you’re feeling better.
I find using AI for writing, programming, or anything along those lines takes more work than just doing it myself. I feel like every line it produces has to be carefully scrutinized and edited. Seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
I’ve actually had a couple of comments come in that were obviously AI generated. They were very well composed in terms of language and grammer, but had a very bland viewpoint. I let the first one in and responded to it, just to be on the safe side. When no response came but I got another unrelated comment from the same IP, I marked it as spam.
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I’ve seen a few suspicious comments, too. So long as the comments aren’t offensive, I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt. If the issue gets worse, I may get more aggressive about deleting those sorts of comments.
I know someone who works in video game development. The company he works for very briefly experimented with AI and came to the same conclusion you did. As I understand it, the AI wrote code that looked so good it was really hard to figure out where the problem was when it didn’t work. Not worth the trouble. They gave up on AI really fast.
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“dull and soulless;” and not “what I was picturing in my head.”
These two comments struck me as the bane of AI. No more incomplete sentences; no more starting a sentence with “And” or “But”. No reactions, no emotion. Yes, dull and soulless.
Gail M Baugniet – Author : #IWSG Focus on AI For Writers (gail-baugniet.blogspot.com)
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Yeah, unless the AI becomes telepathic and starts reading my mind, it’s never going to make what I want it to make. It can produce some interesting things, but I can’t replace me, and it can’t replace you, and it can’t replace any human who has something they want or need to say to the world.
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The only place in my writing that I intentionally use AI are in my science fiction stories ( as subject matter for the stories not as tools to write them).
As fascinated as I’ve been with AI, I’m totally against it writing my stories a making art for the reasons you said.
I’m glad you’re feeling better. I know, it’s hard to write when you’re not feeling well.
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That’s another thing I’m struggling with right now: how do I want to incorporate AI into my Sci-Fi? The kind of AI we have today is so different from the kind of AI I’d want to write about. I haven’t decided yet how to handle that.
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I feel exactly the same way about AI intruding into the arts. And I thought your point about the sense of awe and wonder being lost was brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better myself! 🙂
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Generative AI is just souped up predictive text. It can predict which word is most likely to come next in a sentence, but that doesn’t mean it understands what we’re talking about.
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