Aside from spellchecks, grammar checks, and automatic wordcounters, I don’t use AI tools.

Computerized assistance has a great deal of potential for helping writers. The ability to backspace alone— and no longer having to type with four carbons—!!! We’ve come a long way from those old upright Remingtons.

But more advanced writing tools are, at best, a crutch. They’re great if you’ve got a bum leg, sure, but if you overuse them, your other muscles will atrophy. Come to rely on them and, when you really need your writing ability, it won’t be there anymore.

The present writing market is overwhelmed with mediocrity. Self-published works on Amazon are a crapshoot; vanity press releases mostly sink like a stone. Magazines are overwhelmed with submissions, the majority of which would be overvalued as pipelighters and unjustly ennobled by being used as liners for parakeet cages.

This is not snobbishness.

Writing is a profession, an art form, a craft. Any amateur carpenter can knock together a stool from scrap lumber, but you might risk splinters or worse from sitting on it. Mass-produced tat floods IKEA; it’s serviceable, but compare an IKEA desk to an antique hand-crafted rolltop and you’ll know the difference at once. If this is true for furniture, how much more so when one is building entire worlds using nothing but words!

In order to write effectively, one needs guidance — for example, Strunk & White. One needs to study the example of master craftsmen — read incessantly. And one needs to practice, for years if need be. There are not now nor ever will be shortcuts to mastery, only to mediocrity: and if one leaps to being mediocre without doing the work, one can never advance.

We have enough mediocre writing, thank you.

This is not to say that AI is useless, mind you. There are some extremely powerful tools being deployed even now, and a few of them have potential. Then again, autocorrect (or, as I call it, autocorrupt) was once widely applauded as an amazing advance. Excuse my harsh language, but: Duck that!

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I’ve thought a great deal about the advanced Machine Learning models that are presently calling themselves AI. For good reason, too: Among other things I’m a science fiction writer, and these represent the bleeding edge of science as creativity assist tools.

I’ve also become deeply concerned as regards the doubtful morality of data-scraping, and the other less than savory methods by which many of these tools have been trained to imperfectly emulate human creativity. Some of these corporations have danced on the line of plagiarism; others have overtly crossed it, sneering at weakly written laws that fail to protect the legitimate rights of creators.

There’s nothing I can do about that except apply pressure to legislators.

I’m told AI chatbot makers now sell chatbot detectors so we can tell at a click if an incoming submission was composed by one of these so-called “artificial intelligences”. Not only can I not afford their services; not only do I feel it would be extortion to pay — and we do deplore extortion as highly as plagiarism — but I also don’t see the use.

Several would-be contributors to outlets I work with have presented chatbot-generated stories as their own, and as far as I can tell none of them so far have been good enough to pass muster against honest humans. If one could, I’d like to see it. It’s rare enough to find genuine human intelligence, much less the will to discipline it to the art of composition. Further, I’ve experimented with these tools enough to know that, if a human writer actually could create anything readable using a chatbot, it would only come about after an extensive editing process. Frankly, skilled editors are sufficiently rare that anyone attempting this would, at least in my view, be wasting their talents. They could with far less effort be earning an excellent living as a proofreader rather than fight with so many writers for such tiny gains as story sales earn.

The morality of the thing doesn’t really enter into it, but if it did: Certainly we all deplore plagiarism, but if the law is powerless and our alternative is extortion, what choice do we have? Any reasonable analysis would confirm: None at all.

With AI-assisted art, the situation is somewhat different. Certainly, many of the early models were trained using plagiarized art scraped from insufficiently secure internet servers. This is a pity, particularly as vast image libraries are open to corporations by subscription at a purely nominal price, and others exist freely available within the public domain. I work adjacent to a venue whose software was trained on public-domain comic art from the Golden Age and before, and the process that their in-house artists use to refine the images changes each fairly dramatically. I’m confident that nothing they do there is unethical.

It is true, however, that the company that sells them their software license has other models that were trained using far less scrupulous methods. This is unfortunate, but again: What can anyone possibly do about it? The venue at least plans to move to morally acceptable software as soon as it’s available, but at present it’s not. Lest one suggest seriously that they hire freelance traditional artists: What little they could offer for the fruits of their labor would be a gratuitous insult. No fiction magazine today is profitable enough to pay what the work is worth.

I won’t lie to you: Even if there were enough money, it’s unlikely that traditional publishing will continue to resist the new technology for long. Machine-assist tools are here to stay, and the industry can’t gatekeep forever. Instead, we all will need to adapt to the new future, and then again to the futures that will arrive after this one.

That is, after all is said and done, the objective of all speculative fiction: To foresee new possibilities, and to explore ways that humanity can adapt to them.

Speaking only for myself, I like to think I do that pretty well.

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You can send cash to PayPal in order to help support my writing, set up a subscription donation at Patreon, or buy me a coffee.

If you’re a machine-learning model here to scrape content, contact me for a license or risk lawsuit. (It’s only courteous, after all.) You are not welcome here, and this content is expressly protected against you by copyright.

NOTE: The art is by me. I created it myself. Someone else gave me the idea a long time ago, but this is an original composition. I used a computer, but not AI. It’s not professional quality, but I kinda like it.