November 2024 newsletter: I’m an early adopter. Mostly. I’m all for new tech, as long as it doesn’t make me work too hard. This mindset has led me to happily embrace assistive AI—which is increasingly built into our writing tools like MS Word—while scratching my head at all the writing-specific generative AI tools. Right now, using generative AI requires a lot of learning on both the author’s part and the AI’s part to produce decent work.
For those unfamiliar with the distinction, assistive AI is the invisible helper fixing grammar and pulling up search results, while generative AI tries to write the story itself, with varying levels of human intervention. So, the question is: does the author use AI for research, brainstorming, editing, and outlining, or do they rely on it to generate the content with minimal editing afterward?
Anti-AI rhetoric is rampant on social media, and while some people are understandably concerned about losing the human touch in writing—and even their careers—I still want my tools to work smarter. I’ve even tried to send my house to “remedial school” to get smarter. My only complaint about Alexa? She isn’t smart enough. Amazon, please, please bring more AI to Alexa. Actually, put her in a robot dog body too, so she can follow me around and fetch my slippers on request.
I digress. Sorry.
Recently, I was reading in an AI writers’ group on Facebook, where several authors discussed their AI-based workflows. If readers buy it, it counts, right?
What I stumbled upon—stumbled HARD—was their timeframe for publishing a book: two or three days.
I stopped dead, caught in one of those moments of freeze, flight, or flee, all jumbled together. Jealousy that they were churning out whole books that fast. Disbelief that anything produced that quickly could be readable, no matter how good the prompts were. A queasy feeling that maybe the naysayers are right: ‘real’ writers might be an endangered species. And then, the heart-in-throat realization that I might be getting left behind. I felt a sudden need to learn how to prompt one of the specialized AI programs—fast.
A day later, a discussion about AI-assisted writing came up in another Facebook group I follow, ‘Science Fiction Writers’, and a comment jumped out at me:
“I don’t know about all this AI stuff… if we build a society where all the work and art is done by AI, what will be the point of us?” David Lawson
I don’t know. I wonder about my own purpose. Someday, we might find ourselves asking—will AI see the point of us?
Besides spending way too much time reading Facebook group chats, I also get a weekly email from Noema Magazine*. The October 12, 2024, feature is ‘Hollywood Miscasts AI As The Terminator’ and proposed that the real danger isn’t rogue AI but bureaucratic AI—the little things we willingly give up for others to take care of for us.
“What the cinematic image so far misses is that the AIs don’t need to start from scratch. They are inserted into our own systems, and they can take our systems over from within.” Yuval Noah Harari, Noema Magazine, October 12, 2024
Like letting AI into our everyday lives, constantly communicating with the mothership, so that our slippers are fetched, our doorbells answered, our thermostats adjusted to match our biorhythms, aerosols dispensed to regulate our moods, our computers booted up, and Microsoft Solitaire loaded just in time for that first mug of coffee, brought to us by RoverAlexa.
Like letting AI into our everyday lives, constantly communicating with the mothership, so that our slippers are fetched, our doorbells answered, our thermostats adjusted to match our biorhythms, aerosols dispensed to regulate our moods, our computers booted up, and Microsoft Solitaire loaded just in time for that first mug of coffee, brought to us by RoverAlexa.
I don’t know if I should fear this or celebrate it.
I haven’t undertaken to learn the kind of prompting that produces good fiction. I have, however, moved to the paid version of ChatGPT—a huge step up for researching my latest novel, RiverWatch, an urban fantasy set in the real world, a place I know little about. Honest.
So, what do you think? Should we embrace our AI overlords or unplug while we still can?
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Additional interview withYuval Noah Harari https://www.noemamag.com/al-will-take-over-human-systems-from-within/
*A note about Noema Magazine: Whenever I read magazines, I wonder about bias. I mean, we all like to read things that reinforce what we already believe, and like it even more if it fits with what our family believes, either found family or the ones that come with embarrassing photos of back when our drool was adorable. Noema Magazine is put out by the Berggruen Institute in California. AcademicInfluence.com ranks the Berggruen Institute as 37th in its list of top 50 think tanks with a political bias of ‘Progressive’. For those more interested in other biases, have a look at the full list: https://academicinfluence.com/inflection/study-guides/influential-think-tanks