Is AI the Devil?

How much is too much?

Someone screeched at me today that any AI was too much, and that any use of it compromised one’s status as a creative. It’s getting harder to avoid. No one asked for smart fridges or toasters, and I certainly don’t want Google or Microsoft to cram more invasive nonsense into their products. As a writer, every tool I touch, whether it’s Word, Docs, or Scrivener, seems to have some element of that ugly beast in it.

Amazon demands that authors declare whether they’ve used generative AI in producing their works, and I’m good with that. There’s a lot of garbage on the Zon, and any effort to clean up that particular sludge pond is a good thing. I don’t want to have to wade through poorly written stories, but neither do I want machine-written sludge.

“AI-checkers” are notorious for false positives. Do you use proper grammar? Semicolons or emdashes? You’re at risk of being flagged.

My writing is my own. I will never use generative AI to write a story. But it can sure tell me that the character I’m using in this chapter was one that I killed off two chapters ago. Or that the paragraph I just wrote screams with passive voice.

Where is the line?

I love to write, but I suck at creating images. I can’t draw (or sing) to save my life. If I illustrate my work with AI images, I’m taking money away from a legit artist, but I can’t do chapter header illustrations or even cover art without breaking the bank. I can generate images to help me flesh out characters or settings, but I will never try to pass that off as mine.

In my mind, tools are tools. They can help a creative person to produce a better work, but they can‘t do that work themselves.

Does thinking that way make me an evil person? I don’t think so.

And by the way, the attached image was created (hand-drawn) by Katherine Gramckow.