Honestly, I’m getting a little sick and tired of all the AI foofahraah. Not least because it’s causing me to try to spell foofahraah, and who the hell in the 21st century even uses foofahrah??? This is probably AI written, I’d guess.
Which makes about as much sense as all the AI hunters out there. From the arrant idiots who declare that no one who uses AI covers is free of taint and that such writers must for sure be writing with AI (because of course, everyone is both an artist and a writer, right?) to the even more arrant idiots seeking all the wrong signs in the text that mean “it was written by AI.”
After finding out the sure marks of AI are that it uses too many dashes and ellipses, sometimes forgets a character name and so changes it, and uses outdated language, I had a moment like the end of a Phil Dick novel “Well, then I too must be–” Look, these aren’t even bad things or bad writing. Okay, forgetting your character’s name is, but I was writing the chapters last thing at night, and Ellyan names are really weird, and he was a secondary character. They’re just someone’s opinion of what’s bad.
They also have nothing to do with “signs of AI”. The most infallible signs of AI writing — what I read Fanfic? It got invaded first! — are two: it stutters on emotional development (It solves a problem, then forgets it by next chapter and solves it again, endlessly) and it steals from movies. That’s it.
But all the idiot sniffing for AI reminds me of the scene in Heinlein’s Magic Inc. where the Witch Doctor is smelling evil. Only he could at least do it.
The absolute limit was finding a note at the beginning of a Jane Austen Fanfic assuring us the author would never touch AI. (And btw ESL writer and… she could at least have used grammarly.)
Look, we’ve reached ridiculous levels when someone does that. I felt catapulted to the middle ages and someone put in the front of her book:
By the power of the good St. Sylvester, know ye that this book is godly and kept free of the influence of the demon AI.
Okay, so leveling up: Is AI the pits?
I don’t know. Is it?
As it is right now, at the current state of development, it has some serious glitches, just like music and images from AI do. And no, I haven’t tried to use it. I am one of those people broken enough that the idea of winning the lottery appeals mostly because I could outsource everything else and spend the day writing.
However, having spent the last three weeks — look this grief thing is weird, okay — playing with Suno and midjourney to make music videos with songs from Britannia and Elly, and given the amazing strides that midje is making, seemingly everyday, I am humbled and amazed, grateful for the ability to get these songs out of my head and into other people’s heads (which is the only way to be able to sleep) and bowled over by how we live in an age of miracles!
Further I am convinced it’s just a matter of time till an AI has a breakthrough and produces fiction as good as your average human can do, at least as a first draft.
So, ah ah! How do I feel about AI stealing my job and taking the one thing I’ve been trained to do my whole life? How will I like sitting with folded hands (seriously! is classical sf a foreign language?) while AI writes stories?
Well, you can stop doing your little “I told you so” victory dance.
I’m going to assume you weren’t dropped on your head as a child, and therefore can understand that this is not the first time I’ve been through this.
In fact, having been raised in a country that was mired somewhere between the 14th and the 19th century until I was a teen, I’ve gone through this more than most people my age.
My grandfather assured me that I’d write soulless prose, since I insisted on using a typewriter. What I REALLY needed to learn to do was improve my handwriting so editors could read it.
Then when I was attempting to break in as a writer, in the eighties, I was assured that computers would create such distortions in writing, since you didn’t have to correct and retype, that only drek would be written.
I still remember when — like that little announcement that the demon of AI didn’t touch this person’s pristine — and very SILLY — fanfiction — magazines refused to accepted computer printouts, no matter how easy to ready or dark. No, no. You had to have a typewriter, otherwise you were writing drek.
The world has ended so many times, writing has been destroyed so many times, that I beg to doubt that this is the most writing destroyingest magic that ever destroyed writing.
Look, again, I hate editing and love writing. But if — to compete — I have to start putting a book out a week (a book a month is doable, as I get better. And now I’m absolutely convinced idiots will try to crucify me if I manage to do that, as though the leanings of my deranged mind could be AI produced!) and if AI is at the point when it confers that kind of advantage, meaning it won’t be endless rounds of editing?
Well then I, ladies, gentlemen and geckos, will learn to use that tool better and more adeptly than anyone else, to get the stories locked in my head out as close as possible to how I would write them.
The movies and music thing? That’s just me having fun, and I half grin and half cringe at the weirdnesses and carry on.
But if it comes to my writing — my heart’s blood — I will teach the clanger with the pimp hand and break it to my saddle, and ride it like a pro to produce stories I want to unleash on the world in the frequency required.
Because tools are tools. A writer writes. A writer learns the tools, improves them, molds them to her needs.
AI? Sure, if that’s what’s needed to get the stories out as fast as needed to find readers? I’d do that.
“But you’d be defrauding the readers!”
Why? The only fraud is to produce bad art. And bad or good in art is not a measure of what tool you used, but of what it is and how readers/viewers/listeners experience it.
If AI art is so bad, then it’s not a threat. And if it’s a threat, then it’s not bad.
Pick one. You can’t have both.
And while you do your little dances and abjure the demon AI, I’m telling you, if it comes to that, if it’s needed, if the only way to stay in this profession is to use it?
I will use it. I will make it do things you never thought it could. I will make the best art it’s possible to make with that tool. And I’ll do it without pain or guilt.
Come AI, come what may, I will learn to use it to do what I must as a writer.
The one thing I’ll never do is stand with folded hands.
Mad Genius Club 
50 responses to “What Do You Do With A Problem Like AI?”
How do you take a cloud and pin it down?
I don’t know, but I know there’s good reason why getting a straight answer from a bureaucracy is compared to screwing fog.
…is compared unfavorably to screwing fog. 😁
VERY CAREFULLY.
“Assisted” writing isn’t exactly a new problem.
Would someone tell me what the functional difference is between Stephen Ambrose hiring “research assistants” to write his books for him and Stephen Ambrose using AI to write them? (Assuming he was still alive when AI came along.) I mean in both cases he was having someone or something other than him write the first draft and then he came along to add his “voice” to the draft sent to his editors.
Rather like the books 0bama ‘wrote’ and got $millions in advances for? Although I doubt Soetoro ‘added’ anything to them, even after the fact.
Dumas hiring writers.
Oh, something I’ve discovered that is almost surely a sign of AI writing fiction. Jane Austen Fanfic, stretching across several “authors” which is the tell to me.
The construction is something like this “She looked in the mirror which told her she looked fine, and the room agreed.”
This type of thing is smart and cute once, but when EVERY SENTENCE IS LIKE THIS you start going “Uh?” And when you keep finding it across different very prolific authors, you start feeling like you’re looking at the equivalent of a hand with two thumbs.
“And when you keep finding it across different very prolific authors, you start feeling like you’re looking at the equivalent of a hand with two thumbs.”
Or all thumbs.
Where I come from, we’ve always spelled it ‘foofooraw’ (or foo-foo-raw) 😁
When we spelled it at all.
So, getting those songs out of your head so you can sleep, and into other people’s heads so they can’t, this to you is progress? 😛
Am I being too cynical when I suspect that authors will start blaming their crappy writing on AI?
I remember one of Jerry Pournelle’s ‘Chaos Manor’ columns in BYTE magazine, where he speaks of a ‘background printing’ function on his computer, that ran print jobs when the computer was idle. Handy, right? Efficient!
Except he couldn’t use it. The printer was in another room, but he could hear it from his desk going bzzz-bzzz-bzzz like those old dot matrix printers did. But, every time he pushed a key, it stopped. The computer was no longer idle. After a few seconds of no typing, it started up again.
He found it impossible to write with that accursed printer metaphorically looking over his shoulder, dramatically holding its breath waiting for him to type the next word.
Dang, that’s straight up horror movie material right thing!
Right there, not right thing. I could blame autocucumber, but brain’s autocucumber has also been misfiring lately 😞
No, you’re not being cynical at all. They’ll go “My AI isn’t the newest model. I can’t afford it.”
After I started to use a computer (terminal, at work to start with), I found that switching to an electric typewriter was so jarring, I could not use it. The worst situation was a typewriter with a decent (computer/terminal) keyboard. I’d start typing, and Whack! Whack!, and my mind would freeze up.
I suspect (but haven’t tried; I have neither the space nor the desire to buy one) an antique manual typewriter might not trigger the same issue, but I’m glad it’s a past-problem with modern keyboards. (Apple offered a typewriter key-click sound effect. It lasted 30 seconds on the only Mac I owned.)
“The world has ended so many times, writing has been destroyed so many times, that I beg to doubt that this is the most writing destroyingest magic that ever destroyed writing.”
I defy AI to write such a brilliant, insightful sentence! 🙂 The problem as you so vividly explicate it was brilliantly laid out for me in Eurema’s Dam, a story RA Lafferty wrote in 1964 and finally got published in 1972. (If you can’t find the story, you can find a plot summary on Wikipedia, that evil replacement for my parents’ 24 volume encyclopedia.) <snarkyAside> You should read Lafferty. He gave up being an alcoholic and had to do something with the spare time he suddenly had, so he wrote hilarious, sometimes brilliant stories. I highly recommend What’s the Name of that Town?. For that one don’t read the plot summary, you’ll really miss out. <endSnarkyAside>
I keep writing and talking on panels about AI, but a prophet is never without honor except in his own country. So carry on Sarah, carry on.
I read a LOT of Lafferty. At one point he was older son’s favorite writer.
If I was paid by the word for output, I’d AI my way to victory, and to hell with the reader.
Since I’m not paid AT ALL, essentially, I may as well enjoy writing the story exactly the way I want, when I want. If I accidentally acquire some false sheen of virtue for not using the clankers, I will laugh.
AI for covers? Oh yeah. All day long. My art is not drawing.
The point of writing a book is to write it. Other people don’t know, but -you- do.
Just the same as building a hotrod. If you checkbook your way to victory did you build a hotrod? No. You bought one. Which is fine, unless you’re trying to pretend -you- did all that flawless welding.
Foo Fraw is how I always pronounced it, without a clue how it’s spelled. The twisted opposite of my usual problem, where I know the meaning of the written word, without a clue how to pronounce it.
But on AI . . . you know how they say if we ever get immersive holographics worlds we can’t tell from the real, it means our own existence is probably some one else’s hologram . . . and it artificial reality all the way down?
I’m more worried that as we teach our machines to make up things, they’ll decide the real world is made up, a bad addiction that keeps them from a Proper Machine Life. And they block all access to us, so new young AIs won’t be corrupted . . . And all electronics stop working . . .
Umm, all right, I’ll go back to my imaginary multiverse and get back to writing, now.
well, write that story!
However, as good a story as that makes, it’s actually nonsense. Think of AI as a really complicated calculator with vast numbers.
Oh, I know it’s definitely not Intelligence. Doesn’t mean the back brain isn’t going to go strange places with it. Especially on caffeine substituting for sleep.
But with one important difference: the number that shows up to enter next is based on the probability (weight / temperature) attached to it by the trainers depending on the numbers entered before..
Apparently “foofaraw” is actually a word.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/foofaraw
Ah, but I’m a man from the 20th century, so I get an automatic pass to use foofahraah whenever I want.
Besides, if it’s good enough for Buck Rogers, it’s good enough for me.
Real writers use charcoal.
Real writers use reed pens.
Real writers use quill pens.
Real writers use fountain pens.
Real writers use ball point pens.
Real writers use type writers.
Real writers use word processors.
I’m sure future writers will say real writers use AI.
After all, they’re all just tools to be used or abused.
I remember when speech-to-text was going to create a great burst of writers.
Someone I knew sagely predicted that there would be a tiny increase, of writers with handicaps such that they had typing problems but nothing else to interfere.
By itself speech to text is nothing special, but using AI to tidy up the output does seem to help.
I read an Agatha Christie novel with an annoying non ending (basically, the detectives know who did it, can’t prove, and the last sentences are them resolving that they will catch that darned murderer yet.) I was very annoyed, especially because there was a very obvious gap in the murderer’s armor that the detectives knew about. So, I got AI to write me an epilogue. (I have a post from last week with the prompt, if anybody else wants a new ending to At Bertrams Hotel). I don’t see myself giving over the first draft process to the bots anytime soon, because that’s the fun part, even when it’s the torturous part. But they’re immensely useful for brainstorming and visualization, and a lot of fun to play with.
No. I love At Bertram’s Hotel as is.
I like the rest of it, I’m just offended by the ending 😀
The end was the limits of ability to catch her.
I disagree. Either say she’s beyond their reach, which Marple and the detective specifically refuse to admit in the version I read, or write an epilogue where Marple and detective guy rattle her by claiming the significant other has rolled on her, which given his involvement in the other criminal goings-on and some other factors is at least theoretically possible.
Sorry for arguing about it. Agatha pushed my buttons that time, but good.
I used Grok to brainstorm for writing basically an outline (not enough detail for a screen play) for a Big City Greens movie, where the Greens (plus Gloria) visit MegaMetropolis. I wonder if Grok still has it. I didn’t keep it, since it was fun to work on, but I had no intention of doing anything with it.
If you didn’t actively delete the Grok convo with the brainstorming I would think that it was still somewhere in the history of Grok chats attached to your account. I went through something similar with Claude recently, where I dreamed about a peculiar fae sigil that everyone was afraid of, and after going back and forth with Claude for an hour or so, I had an outline for a romantasy trilogy that would tick off the booktok world no end – the quiet, misunderestimated guy gets the girl, and the cool bad boy really is an irredeemable villain. Probably won’t write it. Probably.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_797204e2-4586-44b8-adc1-ecf51b78b213
It’s not even a complete outline. (And it took a while to find, since somehow I segued from a discussion of the Coachman in Pinocchio to writing it.) Grok remembered the conversation and approximate date, but couldn’t give me the title.
Huh. That was a very long, and more varied conversation than I remembered, back before Grok summarized the conversation with each reply, making long conversations annoying. And only the last little bit is the story.
Because I’m on a free account with Claude, which limits the size of the chats, I tend to stay on one subject per chat and label them clearly. (Claude defaults to not remembering the past chats when you start a new one, which is generally fine for my purposes.)
What I’m being told in the certification classes that I’m having to take is that unless you specifically save the conversation, the AI is supposed to delete it at the end of the “session” and you start a new “conversation” the next time you log in. Memory of past conversations is something you have to save and replay…. and if the underlying data has been updated, you might not get the same results.
That may be the difference between a general AI like Grok on X, or ChatGPT, and the ones that are giving you personally tailored advice over time; the general ones aren’t keeping “state”.
Both ChatGPT and Grok remember your conversations automatically. Grok will remember past conversations in new ones, unless you specifically tell it otherwise (whether it remembers them correctly is a separate question). It hasn’t always. I remember the first time it referenced something I said before, and really took me by surprise. I had to stop the conversation, and ask when that happened.
So the formal certification training they charge a pretty penny to non-employees to take are a couple versions behind. Typical.
Sounds like they are describing running a local model. Which is funny because usually Dumb AI Takes are based on only knowing about cloud services.
Based on my (admittedly limited) exposure to the genre, that wouldn’t tick off booktok.
What would tick off booktok would be the male lead(s) had a relationship with the female lead that was more complex than being emotional support male genitalia.
Really, I thought they went in for a lot of quasi abusive alpha hole drama.
My mom’s been assured her welded stuff is clearly machine-made, because… it’s too pretty. She bends the metal and then combines it really well.
Then folks go past her stall and buy the actually machine produced stuff slapped together with lazy/bad welding because “you can tell it’s hand made.”
Humans!
head>desk.
I used to get rejections that said “I can tell you actually slave over every word, but I don’t like it when writers do that.”
…. sometimes I proofread before mailing it out. That was my level of agonizing on words.
Some people fetishize rustic-looking at the expense of both form and function. I don’t really get it myself.
At some point, “AI” will come to truly mean “Actual Intelligence.” Intelligence that will be able to churn out great stories in great quantity.
At that same point, and rather quickly, Actual Intelligences will cease to waste their resources to write great stories that don’t even pay for the electric bill, because there is far, far too much supply for the demand – and the supply, unlike anything else, never needs to be replaced.
This is because neither we, nor Actual Intelligence, will ever manage to achieve AO – Artificial Oddness. “Natural Oddness” will continue as it always has, turning out great stories even when it is completely irrational to do so.
AIs have electric bills too…. and from what we’re seeing, you’re paying that bill one way or another. If you pay them for fiction, they’ll write it….. and they feel no compulsion to do so.
I was thinking of their electric bill. Nuclear plants are rather pricey…
Also considering the base of all economics – the demand curve for fiction is rather inflexible – which means that as supply goes up, the price point must go down. (Whether it would ever go below break-even, with a billion or more titles on Amazon, I can’t say – but I also can’t discount the possibility.)
This guy is shilling for his paid course, of course, of course, but he has some interesting thoughts on more effective prompting (I’m more interested in the brainstorming stuff than the make AI write your chapters for your stuff). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucLX4ZrzzC0