Writer Rambles #4

This weekend I saw a cursed post on Bluesky, which, of course, was a screenshot from Reddit.

What are we even doing here? I am very anti-AI, but I can understand grifters using it to write books and essentially creating a content mill for slop where they make money off the initial sales, start a new pen name when that one tanks, lather-rinse-repeat. That makes sense to me because grifters gonna grift. What I don’t understand with this post is that the poster has been writing a book for several months. Months!

All the AI evangelists tout AI as something that helps them streamline the process, be more efficient, etc., but non-AI using authors take months to write their books. Why bother using it if it literally takes the exact same amount of time as just doing it yourself? The funniest part to me is that this person knows enough about writing that they can see the flaws in AI generated prose. It tends to be choppy, repetitive, and circular or broken up in a way that humans don’t write. I’ve read quite a bit of it as a professor who teaches freshman writing, and it’s easy to spot because it makes mistakes in style that humans don’t.

So this person who understands writing enough to say don’t use staccato sentences, be descriptive, etc. is still using AI to write their book. My question is why can’t they just apply that to their own writing? Half the battle of becoming a decent writer is seeing the flaws in your own prose and fixing it. If you can see it in ChatGPT’s prose, you should be able to see it in your own.

The issue of writing in the style of another author is common in AI writers and novices as well. Voice is something one develops over time. It isn’t something you can shoehorn into a book, and a lot of the “voice of” is really just symbolism, metaphor, imagery, etc. that gets repeated in an author’s work, not the actual structure of their sentences. People like Tolkein or Lemony Snicket might have very stylistic prose that can be emulated, but for many popular authors, that isn’t going to work. This is why I tell my creative writing students not to copy authors they like and just to write what’s in their heads. Your voice starts as an amalgamation of the all the works you consume, but over time, you appear through it. AI can never do that. All it can do is make a Temu version of popular authors, and it tickles me that these slop jockeys think it does anything but pale in comparison to the real thing or to authentic voice. After reading essays my students have turned in, I would rather get 100 off the wall student-written essays than derivative AI slop.

The last sentence in the post is really what had me confused: “feed it prose I already edited that’s technically mine.” What do you mean technically yours? I had assumed that this person was writing chunks of fiction and feeding it into the AI in order for it to spit out something more stylistic and beefed up. Are they not actually writing anything? People who cobble together books with AI get really pissy when you tell them they aren’t actually writers, and I really do wonder how they think they qualify if they aren’t actually writing anything. If you’re just typing in a prompt and having it spit out more words than you put in, that isn’t writing a book. The AI is collating words that make sense together, but in no way will that ever have the authorial intent or cohesion of a book written by an actual author who can plan and weave and use their imagination.

As you can imagine, the comments on this thread were equal parts heartening and horrible. The horrible side contained a bunch of people giving tips on how to skirt the new limitations by tweaking the wording. The rest were chef kiss in that it was a whole wall of “HAHA you actually have to learn to write.” I am one of those people. My feeling about generative AI is that it, its creators, and the people who use it can all get fucked. It is the biggest grift we have seen in some time, and all it does it have people cede their skills and creativity to an over-hyped predictive text program. There is no substitute for human feelings, ingenuity, and creativity, and there is no way in hell I would ever cede any ground to a machine no matter how much brain fog or fatigue I had (since so many evangelists try to say its ableist to tell people not to use AI or that you won’t read it). I sometimes think of all those people who said things about giving into temptation or selling your soul to the devil, and I can’t think of a more apt real example of that than a machine that saps you of the things that make us human.