Good morning, authors! My favorite news site (Tangle News) was on break last week, and while I very much enjoy their evenhanded and meticulously accurate news coverage, I realized how delightful it can be to take a little sabbatical from the constant barrage now and then. Try it and see what happens with your creativity. Freed from that weight, my brain enjoyed winding along various paths of thought, imagination, planning, and just peace. As I told a friend of mine contemplating a news break of her own, the world won't end if we aren't always up on every single development. But back in the world of headlines, artificial intelligence continues to be a charged topic, especially for writers, and lately I've been hearing more authors seemingly flirting with a funk about what it may mean for the future of our industry and our creative careers. Like many of us I'm trying to navigate the hype and hysteria and figure out how to adapt in a world and a field that's changing phenomenally fast because of it. Today's post was inspired by my latest argument with AI—a ridiculously illogical habit I've gotten into—and how to protect yourself from its inaccuracies, misinformation, and hallucinations. It's a 13-minute read. Also in today's newsletter, as always you'll find this week's Writerly Resources and my current favorite things (which continue to be edible ones, after my culinary idyll in France). |
[td] When I was young, and an avid Star Trek fanatic, I desperately wanted to be Spock. Not only did it look very peaceful to be free of pesky, painful emotions (ha! says the editor who spends many of her workdays encouraging authors to plumb the depths of their most vulnerable, difficult feelings), but he and I were kindred spirits in his frequent claim that “humans are illogical.”Yet I am manifestly not Spock, nor ever fully succeeded in adopting his Vulcan ways, as evidenced by a habit I have of arguing with AI chatbots, which I know to be nonsentient machines operating from programming and the data fed into them. We’re not tackling the ethical and artistic issues of AI in this post—I’ve touched on them before in these posts, and plenty has been written. In short: It’s here, it’s a tool, and each of us has to determine whether and how we’re comfortable using it. For me it’s strictly an occasional administrative tool for information and “grunt work”; it has helped me understand and strategize things beyond my ken, like optimizing my blog posts for SEO and GEO visibility, or creating A+ Amazon content for my books. It’s excellent at generating paragraphs of clunky or ineffective writing I can use as “before” examples in presentations. But I won’t farm out my creative process to it, nor use it for any aspect of my editorial feedback or clients’ work, based on my feelings about the creative and critical-thinking atrophy of the former and the ethics of the latter. (In fact, I recently added a clause to my editorial contract spelling out this guarantee: that no part of my own editorial feedback uses AI in any fashion, nor do I feed any authors’ work, story summary, or any other information into it.) In brief, I don’t trust the f***er. And, if you’ll come along with me on my most recent argument with ChatGPT, I’d like to illustrate why you shouldn’t either—and suggest some ways to utilize the technology, if you choose to, while protecting yourself and your work from its shenanigans.
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