AI AIn't Gonna Happen

 

Indulge me for a moment as jump up on my soapbox and decry AI, as any writer worth their salt should do.

 

A couple of weeks ago, my day-job manager assigned me a 750-word project. Now, the background material I needed to write this piece (i.e., approved language) already exists in one form or another. So, it came as a surprise to me when he concluded his email by suggesting I use Microsoft’s AI tool to help draft the piece.

 

Not one to take great umbrage, I nonetheless took great umbrage.

 

I’m not gonna belabor all the salient points—positive and negative—that everyone else with a functioning brain cell or two has raised about AI and its purpose and use in the creative process. However, knowing what we do about how AI works (i.e., “scraping” existing stuff scattered across the vast plains of the Internet), the thought of using it either in my paying job or to write my books makes me more than a bit nauseous.

 

Which leads to this confession: I did give it a try. Once.

 

While writing But the Dead Know Nothing, I tried to find a source that would provide me with an example of a newspaper article written in 1938 journalistic style. More specifically, I had hoped to track down a published account of a suspected murder, as the plot revolves around a modern-day homicide and its possible relationship to a murder from almost 80 years earlier. When I was unable to do so, I sat back and thought, well, let’s give this newfangled thing called ChatGPT a chance.

 

Now, call it ignorance if you will or declare me a Luddite if you must, but at the time I had no clue what made AI tick. So, I typed in a “cue” using much of the same language as in the above paragraph, and waited for the result to splash across my screen.

 

What came back was a steaming pile of senseless gibberish. At one “paragraph” in length, it neither looked nor read like a 1930s-era news account. I don’t remember the exact verbiage it produced, but suffice it to say what it gave me as unusable. As an alternative, I searched the archives of various newspapers to see if any of them had preserved an article which I could use as a template of sorts. Failing that, I went a different route completely and wrote a paraphrased account of my fictional killing, which my protagonist, Noelani Lee, found buried in the morgue of the fictional Hilo Gazette-Times.

 

Then I shut ChatGPT down. And I never went back.

 

I suppose one could make the argument that using AI could have simplified my task far more than inputting a lengthy list of esoteric search terms, none of which produced anything of value. And I guess my boss was merely trying to be helpful in suggesting I use it for my day-job assignment.

 

But then again, from my limited experience, ChatGPT produced nothing of value. It proved to be a waste of time and resources. Ultimately, I instead unleashed my limited brain power and came up with a result that worked for me and my story.

 

Of course, when it comes to the application of AI in your work, well, YMMV. Some writers find it to be an invaluable tool, and good on them. (Though I have to wonder about the readability of their results, let alone the dubious quality of AI-generated book covers.)

 

The question then is, if you become reliant on AI to do your writing for you, are you actually writing?