Why I’m not using AIs

(Nimue)

I could be using AIs to write a book every day and to create book covers for them all. I’m not. Some of that is because I don’t support the way AI companies are profiting from the work they’ve stolen from creative people to develop this software in the first place. Part is it is because for me that would be both joyless and pointless.

There are a lot of challenges in writing a book. It takes time and work, and the end result tends not to pay very well. I suspect the book a day folk are going to be sorely disappointed about the scope for achieving fame and riches through publishing but there we go. The thing is that I like writing, I like the process.

Many different things go into writing a book. I pull together threads of ideas from all kinds of things I’ve encountered. Often I need to deepen that with research. I spend time thinking about characters and their motives, about themes in the story and about what my readers might need from a story. Then there’s the crafting process – the pace, the precise wording, the quest for the perfect line, or joke, or shiver, depending on what I’m doing. I get a huge kick out of this, and moments when it works are joyful. If I got an AI to do it for me, I’d lose all of that. I wouldn’t get to learn and grow and develop my craft. I wouldn’t feel any satisfaction in finishing a book.

I don’t want to write books that are re-hashes of other people’s books. Yes, like an AI I have learned a lot by reading other people’s work. However one key difference between me and an AI is that I’m trying very hard not to write something that’s already been written. I’m not bringing the plots together from three existing books and mashing them together to claim I have something new. I’m trying very hard to make things that are genuinely new, and genuinely have new things to say. This is really important to me. As a reader I’m also not looking for books that are an awful lot like other books I might have read. I want to be surprised and I seek out authors whose books are distinctive.

Humans have the capacity to imagine things that have never existed. This is a wonderful thing about us. Our imaginations can go anywhere, to any time or place, any kind of life form. We have an infinite capacity for storytelling. This is a magical thing. It’s worth the work and the effort to be able to use your imagination effectively. It’s worth spending the time learning how to craft with this amazing mode of communication that humans have spent so much time developing. Language is beautiful and worthy of your close attention. 

What you can get from spending a few minutes prompting a machine to do something for you is comparatively little. The joy is in the process, in the learning and the pleasure of developing skills. The feelings of success you might get from writing come from the writing itself, and there are no shortcuts to that.