AI in Writing

September 2024

With recent attention (and controversy) surrounding AI in creative activities, I was inspired to elaborate on why I don’t use AI tools in my writing. If you simply have to be sure that a writer publishing on a site named ‘MotherRobot’ truly and plainly doesn’t use AI, I won’t.

Here’s why.

I Enjoy the Writing Process

Writing taps into a hidden world, and allows me to draw that world out for others to enjoy. Characters reveal themselves - sometimes surprising even me. Scenes come alive, and conflicts and resolutions string together to express a theme, a character evolution, and hopefully, a good time. On my best days, I’m truly surprised and enamoured with what comes out of my head and onto the page. New ideas are revealed, to be considered and worked into other parts of the story. And when I’m really lucky, I write something that makes me laugh out loud.

Not everyday is like this. Writing is hard work. Some days the inspiration isn’t there. I struggle with plot points. I find I’ve taken characters in an inconsistent direction. But even on those days, I learn. I may pause to read about the technique I’m struggling with (dialog, point-of-view, action, etc.), or I may open a blank page and try out a completely different story or idea. I may even force the execution of a really bad scene transition. Some forward progress I can lean on (and edit, or delete) in a future day. And like anything one truly works at, it gets easier.

I enjoy the writing process, all of it, and have no interest in giving that over to a machine.

Some AI proponents have advocated for the duality of idea and execution. As if the execution - all the hard yet supremely rewarding work of writing - is just details, just the slog of stringing words together to serve the idea. Often, the idea is more than half the battle to them.

I’m sorry but this can’t be further from the truth. The act of writing, of choosing specific words and phrases to convey your characters, personal theme, and to produce a reaction in the reader, is where the magic happens. In writing, (like in business), ideas are cheap. Execution is priceless. Execution is where choices are made. Where ideas come to life, take shape, evolve, and inspire.

Generative AI is great for taking rote tasks off one’s plate. Ingest a large amount of information and summarize it, for example. One promise of AI is to free humans from rote tasks so they can invest in the complex thinking and interactions necessary to produce. But when you only have a hammer, everything is a nail, and I suspect this false duality in part comes from humans looking for the nail in writing. They need a rote task, then mistake the mystical creative work of making thousands of choices (at least one for every word on the page) as something they can push to the machine. This is at best, misled, and at worst, lazy.

The cursor is an invitation for the writer themselves to answer, what happens next?

I Want to Own My Writing

There is real satisfaction in crafting a creative product that you invent yourself. I remember the feeling when choice phrases first emerge to punctuate a piece. The satisfaction in how they might convey an emotion, a character, or theme. Or how they even changed my understanding of the story. I enjoy revisiting these phrases in the editing and reading process, and anticipate the experience my readers might have someday when they first read them.

The creation of a piece of work intended to tell a story is a wonderful personal experience. I want to own that fully.

This simply isn’t possible with current generative AI, most if not all of which have been trained on copyrighted works, without permission of the authors. OpenAI has gone so far as to argue that it can’t make money without this violation. Revenue that is built on the works of authors, but not shared with authors, is theft. If a writer uses AI in their writing, at best, it’s the machine that wrote the piece (or at least part of it), and at worst, its the machine and another writer who didn’t agree to this use in the first place.

I want to own my writing, and I want everything I write to be my own.

I Want My Writing to be an Artistic Expression

Artistic expression is a conveyance of your personal human-ness, spoken into the universe with intent to convey some meaning. It is not just math. I want my writing to be an expression of me. My intent, my context, my choices, and my flaws. I believe I have something to say in my writing. Even if that is just telling a fun story that entertains or keeps a reader guessing about what’s next.

I don’t want to strip out or surrender parts to be generated or ideated with incomplete instructions given to a machine. I want stories that are me, not cyborgs of me. Just because I can describe a food item to UberEats and something roughly matching my needs arrives at my doorstep does not make me a chef. A chef is the one who selects and assembles the ingredients into a dish.

* CODA

I was asked by an early reader of this piece whether I would re-evaluate my position over time. Of course. I might add more rationale, or attempt to better explain myself. He cut through my coy avoidance and weak attempt at humor with a thought exercise: What would make you want to have an AI in the ‘writer’s room’ with you, collaborating?

I thought for a moment. ‘When that AI can choose to be somewhere else, and yet has chosen to be part of the writing experience. That AI will bring an authentic expression of themselves they want the world to hear.’