This post is a response to a post in the Medium blog about AI.
My thoughts are that AI is here to stay, whether you like it or not, whether you regulate it or not, whether people are honest about their use of it or not. You can rant, rave, demonstrate, jump up and down, shout all the while, throw your clogs into the machinery or whatever else you wish to waste your energy on.
The fact is that like all well-rounded characters, AI has some great advantages, alongside all the terrible things that it also can be. As a writer, decide for yourself what you want to use AI for, and what you do not want to do. You cannot change the characteristics of AI, but you can take advantage of any characteristics that will help you in your quest to be a writer.
The question is really about what readers want to read. It is my belief that readers mainly want to read things that entertain, inform, or make their lives better in some way or another, and the more human the better, as that is what the readers are. They care about the creativity, they don’t care about the background writing, they don’t care about how you did your research or where you got your ideas from, or how the image you used was created. Editors, platform managers and other writers might care about these things, but readers don’t. You might care about these things, too, if your thoughts are governed by your sense of ethics or morals or some other governing principle, but readers don’t. If they don’t like your offering, for whatever reason, they will quickly move to the next thing.
So, you decide. What mix of AI and personal creativity do you wish to employ to put in your writing, that will be consistent with the policies of the platform, the requirements of the editors, that will satisfy your own moral compass, that will allow your writing to be boosted in some way, that will allow you to feel satisfied, whether through monetary compensation or some other metric?
I am a writer, and although I am a retired person who is not aiming for a career in writing, I, nonetheless, have to exist in that environment, which is very much a business environment, where the age-old saying continues to dominate, and is summed-up by 3 words: “Adapt or die”.
I am in the final stages of completing a masters degree in writing and wellbeing (which is also why I have not been posting on Medium in recent months). That particular university department had a complete ban on the use of AI, but they were already getting complaints from students about that. My prediction is that they will very soon be updating their AI policy because, like all universities, their main business priority is to continuously have bodies on seats.
I also have to decide whether I want to write by scribbling in notebooks and filling up my shelves with them, or whether I might wish to return soon to post on platforms. To do the latter, I can go to war with AI, or I can sue for peace and set-up diplomatic relations. I choose diplomacy, but my principal red line is that the creative writing will be generated by me, the human, and not by any AI agent of any kind, and not everything might be resolved at first sitting, but I still have to try. Otherwise, I might as well pack-up and stay home filling-up the notebooks.