I’ve come once more to–
Wait. I can’t even. [Sarah gives the sinal salute, pinching her nose bridge and inclining her head.]
Why in the name of little birds and fishes do people think that it makes them sound either very smart of super-virtuous by announcing “if you use AI” (for anything from cover, to blurb, to even research “I don’t need to read you to know it’s trash.”
The whole thing it does is make them sound dogmatic and frankly lazy.
Look, if you really don’t want to read, and therefore want to cut down as much as possible on your to-read pile, it’s your lookout, and I’m not going to judge you. Frankly if that’s what you’re doing any excuse will do “I don’t like the font.” “The author’s name starts with B.” Whatever.
My friend Jonna sent me this today and it’s about right:
Look, if you’re going to not read me because — one of the things in the song — I use a lot of M dashes, that’s fine. My copyeditor is not fond either, particularly when I nest them. In fact, if my present and past (and future, why not?) copyeditors got together “m dashes” feature high on the likelihood of reasons for them to form a posse to take me out. (Others: completely random spellings of characters names; characters that change name for no reason; random capitalization; falling in love with a word and using it for everything for half a chapter. (sings:) These are a few of my favorite things!)
However, if you’re not going to read me because I use a lot of M-Dashes and you think that means I use AI and AI is particularly horribad, then pardon me but you’re a moron.
I want to start this by pointing out I hear AI content can work okay if people do a TON of editing.
It doesn’t interest me at all because revising is the least interesting part to me. I LIKE writing.
So I don’t use AI for writing my books. For one, it could be argued I don’t use INTELLIGENCE to write my books, because my best writing doesn’t come from my conscious brain. (I’m sure a few of you just decided not to read me because of that, but trust me, my subconscious does a great job.)
I do use AI for covers and blurbs. Could you convince me to pay a “real artist” for art? Sure. If I had the extra money (failed to win the lottery again) to hire the big names and the … speech ability to explain what I actually want, instead of making such a bad job of that that I end up with something I hate and can’t tell the author I hate. Given the current state of my bank account though, if I hire a “real artist” it’s more likely to be someone from Eastern Europe who works for $100 and … uses AI without telling anyone.
In fact, to be absolutely honest, if you’re an artist or writer, you’re far more likely to lose your job to an Eastern European or South American author or artist than to AI. Heck, Jane Austen fanfic is getting taken over by Indian authors, because making an extra couple hundred a month from Jane Austen fanfic is a real income booster. So if you hate AI because you imagine it’s taking money from your pocket, you’re hating the wrong thing.
Now, just about at this moment a bunch of you are starting to yell: No, I don’t like AI written stuff because AI written stuff is crap!
I’ll give you one thing: REAL all-AI written stuff is indeed crap. At least that’s been my experience. Stuff that’s AI written and uploaded without any human touch tends to be dismal.
Even in fanfic, which you’d think would be its natural home, raw AI is… hilariously bad. And gets ratioed within seconds.
But most writing out there is not AI-only. Even the writing that uses AI.
Most of the people I know who use AI in writing, don’t use it to produce the writing at all. They use it as a sort of rubber duck. “My character needs to have a meet cute. What good ideas for those are there for ancient Greece?” But even then, they don’t actually use it for that…. it’s more like the AI suggestions are so bad that they come up with better ones in self defense.
Then there are people who have an ongoing chat with AI. And people who use AI to hunt down repeated scenes in the manuscript. That sort of stuff.
I don’t know — personally — any one who does writing completely by AI, though I understand there are people who not only do it, but then give lectures on how to edit it. Again, if you are absolutely allergic to an empty page, and the thing you want to do most in the world is edit edit edit, then you’ll absolutely love having AI do a crappy first draft. Me, that’s sort of my idea of hell, so no thank you.
However, as a reader, I have exactly one turn off, and it is very much a personal thing: I hate present tense narration.
Even that is not universal. I’ve enjoyed some present-tense books. However, I’ll confess for my popcorn books, like for instance Jane Austen fanfic, I will not download a present tense book.
But that’s a personal thing, and I don’t expect anyone to think I’m extremely smart or whatever from having that quirk. I’m not going to announce it on Twitter, declare it to the world, or any of that.
Because I could be wrong. Tomorrow I could tumble into a present tense JAFF that’s the best thing I’ve ever read and completely immersive.
No. I think the screaming about “AI trash” is not driven by that, but by the idea that people are “cheating” and not suffering for their art as they’re supposed to.
I assume so from the number of people who, without reading me, tell me that if they know I wrote the book in two weeks, then they know it’s bad.
This is — on the face of it — utter nonsense.
In fact, by the only metric available my most successful book i.e the one which made me the most money was written over a weekend. (I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a work for hire. The book was overdue, the editor was calling. I was going nuts. So I took a weekend and slammed it out.)
My week and a half book is not a high performer, but it’s a solid mid-performer. And probably my personal favorite.
In fact, both in reviews and income, how much effort I put into a book just does not at all correlate to how well it does.
Which leads me to believe people who are obsessed with “punishing” those who use “short cuts” be they AI or simply writing really fast, are doing it because they feel people shouldn’t “get away with something.”
Let me assure you: we’re not. Those of us who write really fast pay for it in other ways. We often have long silences between books. Or we “paid” for it by having written a lot and building up our speed that way.
And I bet it’s the same thing with people who use AI in whatever way they use it. Creating is hard. Even with short cuts, you have to learn the short cut. Even with AI tools, you have to learn to use the tool.
In the end, if you succeed, you create something wonderful. If you don’t succeed you create something crappy.
As a reader you don’t need to avoid any hint of AI to avoid bad things. There’s plenty of horrible purely human writing.
Heck, I used to think I could infallibly detect “ESL writing” because I used to teach English to non-English speakers, and therefore know the typical mistakes. Imagine my surprise when I found out that some books I was sure were written by ESL people were written by native English speakers. (I found out because I met them.)
I recommend instead of reading tea leaves to find out if the book is AI and therefore you should hate it that you just read the book.
If you hate it, you hate it. Does it matter to you how it was written?
And who knows? You you just try the books, you might find something you love; something that rocks your world and is the best thing you ever read.
Do you really want to miss that because it was written with the help of AI/in a week/by a writer who plots using the I-Ching?
No. You don’t.
So if you want good reads, just read the d*mn things.
Mad Genius Club 
30 responses to “Reading Trash”
I recently (within the past few months) read an article on SubStack where the author mentioned at the end that it was partially written by whichever brand of AI they used. I saw it because it was shared by one of those virulent anti-AI crusaders, who (and most of the comments) complaining about how this was stifling creativity. So I went and looked at the article. It was primarily a list of names, dates, and events in church history. That’s not creative. As long as you read over for accuracy (since we all know that AIs lie) that could be a great time-saver.
And I know (besides being broke) that I cannot ask a real artist to put a piece of his soul into a bit of throw-away art for my blog.
I also read someone’s post who was only mildly anti AI, who said that the purpose of a necklace was to highlight the neck. And AI art is all necklace, and no neck. I don’t know if I agree with him, but it’s a great line.
The song was written by the incomparable David Badurina, a brilliant absurdist author and creator. He can be found at DavidBadurina.com
Thanks.
If you hate it, you hate it. Does it matter to you how it was written?
LOL! Perfect. Also love me some em-dashes. I also make up words on occasion. AI is great for correcting my misspellings–especially on when to double-letter and when not to double-letter.
As to writing a book fast, Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in a week at the UCLA Library on typewriters he rented for a dime an hour, so nananah!
Are we the same person? Double letters are the bane of my existence.
Hey Sarah, as the author of that song (and someone who had the pleasure of sitting next to you on a panel you moderated in 2024 – I still have the fish), thanks for speaking up on this. There’s a distinct lack of logical reasoning when it comes to AI, particularly in terms of it being a tool and one you can bend to do some pretty epic stuff.
I wrote those lyrics, but the music and singing is itself AI. I remastered the song – with AI tools, but the video was put together with licensed elements.
This is a way forward. Reasonable use to create new art using some of the best tools available.
Appreciate your take here, thank you. – David
I think the next big thing is animated short films which both promote the work and are fun on their own.
Now if I were 20 years younger and had a lot more time and energy. Never mind. I MUST learn to do AI animation.
I use it for everything except writing. Won’t even entertain suggestions, but I will have it act as a project manager to keep me on task and a bit more organized.
Lately I’ve been messing around with doing it for book-based music videos, so I’m cutting a SPACE PEW PEW album, and getting into the animation side of things as well. It’s a lot, but it’s also great fun. If you’re curious, here’s a song about the android Toshiro: https://youtu.be/dvuoaKCAH0Q
There are so many different tools and ways we can market our books these days, and I think that the more out-of-the-box you’re willing to go, the more you position yourself as a unique voice. Best to you, Sarah!
This is a wonderful article—and the song is just…amazing! Although every time I clicked on it ONCE (including reloading the page for the blog) it loaded 12 tabs of the song, all playing slightly off from one another, wow!! LOL I’m wide awake now!
I love editing, (it’s my job!) but when I edit my own work I want to not have to worry about missing that thing which AI made up.
Pretty much agree with everything you’ve said here. Don’t know how I stumbled across you, this is the first I’ve read, but I’m hooked now. Thanks!
This is an interesting topic. How AI is impacting creative writing. I wonder, when word processors first came out did people complain that anyone using a word processor instead of a mechanical typewriter was not a real writer? After all, they were not doing the hard work of retyping every page when an edit was needed.
AI is a tool, if used properly it enhances the writer’s productivity and can even enhance the quality of the product. Writing a poem on a typewriter did not make it good or bad, it made it readable. I wrote poems on a typewriter in the 70s, they were typical 7-year-old quality work. But they were mine and they were readable.
I have recently taken up creative writing again. After writing stories and poems as a kid and into my early 20s, I stopped because of life. Now I use AI in the following ways, to enhance my writing and increase the joy I get from completing writing.
I use AI to:
So by some people’s standards, my writing is slop, but that’s OK. I write for myself not for them. My stories focus on deep emotional state of the characters. Long running story arc’s that show how events shape a characters personal and world view. Those are things AI is terrible at.
I think AI will usher in a new value for literary review. Because the volume of new content is accelerated and includes a lot of content that is near 100% AI created, people are likely to stick with known authors or known reviewers’ recommendations. AI will change writing; it won’t eliminate the need and value of human input in literature.
BTW. None of this post was AI assisted except for Grammarly checking my grammar, so since Grammarly is an AI tool. Well, I guess it is an AI assisted post. I wonder if the AI critics use Grammarly? Maybe everyone should ignore their posts since they used AI.
TXRed as Mod: Kent, somehow your comment got sent to spam as well as duplicated three times. It is now free.
It was user error 100%. I was trying to setup an account and definitely did not understand how this worked at first.
From Sarah:
Oh, yeah. I DO remember the transition between typewriters and computers, and yep, there were the same complaints.
Some magazines would NOT accept computer print outs. Reason I got a daisy wheel printer.
Thank you for reminding me. I’d forgotten that.
There were a lot of guidelines with requirements, but the chief one was the quality of the print-out. A lot of computer printers could not achieve typewriter quality. A slush-pile reader needs to consider his eyes.
Eh. We had one that was at least same quality (commercial, at Dan’s place of work) but it was still verboten because how dare you. And in interviews editors talked about how computers were “cheating” because they couldn’t tell if we were competent enough to properly format and type out a manuscript… as though that meant we couldn’t write a story.
Wow. I’ve only been at this editing gig for a few years, but being good at writing stories is kind of the JOB, right? And the quality of the formatting I get is…well, let’s say it varies, but most is not good. And that’s why it’s part of my job. Editors will love you if you do your best, if you get anything right—unless you can’t write a good story. That’s the primary thing.
Given the current atmosphere at the Big publishers, I’m rather expecting a lot of authors will need drugs. Probably already do.
And once Amazon Kindle gets its’ sticky fingers on it, the formatting, spelling, etc. may suffer. Between downloads, even.
Ah, thanks for the warning! I do far too much screen time for my work, so I don’t use Kindle. I do know that some of the books I’ve picked up recently had good stories but extremely bad formatting, in print. I’d not only be fired but probably have to pay back months…
This.
Oh, yeah. I DO remember the transition between typewriters and computers, and yep, there were the same complaints.
Some magazines would NOT accept computer print outs. Reason I got a daisy wheel printer.
Thank you for reminding me. I’d forgotten that.
I love ellipses . . . they’re how I hear the words in my head . . . the pause to think . . . to boggle . . . the character’s thought that trails off in disbelief . . .
But even my worst AI cover is an improvement on what came before, and I really need to redo all the early ones.
Me too. On ellipsis. And yeah on AI.
Sorry, I would have responded sooner, but I was tired of calling a character from a plot bunny a version of “X meets Y”, and just had a long convo with Claude ai about naming the guy 😀
David Drake used Em-dashes quite a bit–several times a chapter–and nobody could accuse him of being AI. He’d have some entertaining words for anybody who did.
I use ellipses and em-dashes and commas liberally. I sprinkle them through my writing like some folks sprinkle pepper on Cajun cooking. So there.
And as for AI…well, for me it’s a brainstorming buddy and research assistant and first beta reader. My writing depends heavily on being as real world accurate as I can get it. I can ask ChatGPT how a private secretary to a royal princess of the UK is named and appointed, and get a factual answer and hooks to the story in progress. I may or may not use the latter; I usually don’t, preferring to take them as inspiration for my own writing.
But without AI, my work would be worse and slower. Why wouldn’t I use it?
“This uses em-dashes” is a very AI sort of rule
I’m probably going to be able to troll people forever on the ‘define AI’ aspects of whether my writing was assisted by AI.
This one survey I took instructed me to accept the definition of AI as including linear regression.
And, well, most of the academic theory I studied much has a linear model somewhere, and arguably some of the fields are built on linear regression. So if I write a non-fictional thingy built within one of those fields, then I used AI for it, even if I chiseled it from stone after I counted on my fingers.
I’m at the same time a little too young for slide rules, and I also wonder about what we have lost moving to calculators and computers from slide rules and nomograms.
I use computers for some/most tasks. (I’m also stupid, unthinking, and stubborn. Also conservative. So despite using computers all the time, and having a lot of work hour limitations driven by eyestrain, it has taken me until this week to just turn dark mode on. I had to remember about this serious serious obstacle, before I could think to do anything about it. )
I can be pretty utilitarian about how I use computers. I can also have stupid whimsy or outright insanity.
As a writer of trash stories I somehow feel like I should feel attacked by this. Eh. Not worth the bandwidth to bother. At least my trash is moderately entertaining for (counts) about twelve actual people. On alternating Tuesdays, on Odd numbered years. So maybe like three actual people. One of which might be me. So it still counts!
Eh. I too write trash…. 😉
I have lots of opinions and nuances about LLMs and gAIs and programs/software that aren’t much different from JAVA programs or other things. But, that is not important, as it’s my opinion. My shtick is to use it as a marketing ploy. For some people that will matter, for some people it won’t, but it’s a (very small) way to stick out as a little fish in a big pond, to say/advertise/market that I don’t use gAI in my cover art design for myself or other authors.
So, yes, I know how to do it with gAI, (to be a professional you need to research and understand the competition!) and I do use some LLMs/gAI as assistants for organizing and such (as mentioned up above, though currently not for my writing), so I’m not a total hater (I certainly don’t trust them on anything that isn’t simple stuff-I’ve seen the horror stories! lol (I follow several cutting edge AI channels, so I keep up with the good, the bad and the ugly)), but I feel it’s a good marketing thing, without being click-bait, like artisan bread or handmade beaded necklaces.