AI Writers, Please Quit

I came across this excerpt from a writer talking about using generative AI during her writing process, and all I have to say is, if you use generative AI to help you write your book, please quit writing.

That isn’t hyperbole or snark; I mean every word. Here’s the thing about writing, it isn’t glamorous, but people think being an author is. People who use AI to write some or all of their books want the aesthetic of being a writer. They want the fans or readers, they want the pretty covers, the money (lol), the minor amount of fame and prestige it bestows upon someone who has published, but ultimately, they don’t want to do the work to get there. And writing is work. It is incredibly unglamorous work. It’s long days staring at a screen, figuring things out, murmuring to yourself, getting stuck, and getting stuck, and getting stuck. It’s weeks of fiddling with descriptions or rewriting things that don’t quite make sense or need a bit more life breathed into them.

For the writers who use AI, they look at the work part and think about how to eliminate it. Who wants to deal with the ugly, un-fun bits of the process? Let the machine do the things I find hard or unenjoyable.

But once you outsource your process to the plagiarism slot machine, is it even yours? See, the thing about AI is that it doesn’t magically come up with new stuff for you. It’s essentially the predictive text feature on your phone, so it pulls up the most likely thing it can from a combination of words. Not the most correct or the most interesting, the most likely. Whatever description or idea it is spitting out is the lowest common denominator. It’s always going to give you a homogeneous, verbal statistical average. If you generate a bunch of statistical averages, your book is also going to be statistically average and have the same voice as other writers using AI. For some writers, at least the ones who use AI, that’s fine. As long as they can make a little more money or churn out work a little more quickly, who cares if the quality suffers? Their readers won’t even notice.

The fact that they think their readers are so indiscriminate that they won’t even notice their is statistically average is sad. Either they don’t value their readers and don’t think they’re intelligent or they have cultivated a following of people who will shell out for average slop and be happy about it. Personally, if an author I read did that, I would stop reading them, unfollow them, and never give them a dime because they don’t respect me as a reader, and I know a lot of other readers and writers who would do the same.

The thing about art is that the process is the important part. We make money off the final product, but we better our skills through the process and ultimately that is what gets us the best product. Going back to the original quote above, writing that off-handed description of the lobby in the paranormal fish hospital is part of the process. It is the process of getting better at writing descriptions; adding more depth, realism, and interest to your setting; adding theme or mood into your story through the use of setting. No description in your book should be pointless enough that you can hand it off to a computer to write. If it serves no purpose, don’t write it.

The fundamental issue with writers using AI is that they choose to outsource their creativity instead of bettering their craft. Learning your craft comes from doing mundane bits repeatedly or by dissecting what writers you like do and figuring out how to work it into your writing. It’s like playing a sport. Having a robot shoot baskets for you won’t make you better at basketball, only you doing lay-ups and practicing can do that. Writing, art, crafts, etc. are skills that can only be increased with practice. Every writer using AI has lost the plot in that regard. Outsourcing the mundane bits will ultimately make you a worse writer because the muscle you have for writing those bits will atrophy over time, and you will have to rely on it more and more. Same for using it for research, coming up with ideas, outlining, editing, etc. Those are skills you need to learn and strengthen through practice and getting feedback from other people. The machine cannot give you feedback as it does not have a brain that can analyze and be critical. It can only regurgitate what it thinks you want to hear. It’s also not a search engine, so any research it brings up is not necessarily accurate, just the thing that appears the most in relation to the terms you gave it. It’s a median machine.

At its core, authors utilizing AI leans heavily on the idea that talent for art or writing is either innate or store-bought with no between. Those who think they don’t have innate talent go for store-bought (the AI) when in reality the writers they think are innately good have just practiced for years and the store-bought isn’t talent, it’s basically a box of saw dust mislabeled as cake mix. Adding your characters’ names to it won’t make it any better, but people will still buy it if you put a shiny enough wrapper on it.