Why Writers Should Not Use AI
Using generative AI to write stories is a terrible idea
If you’re a beginning writer or if you’ve been writing for years, there are many reasons why you should not use generative AI.
I’ll outline a few here to hopefully discourage you from making this possibly career-ending mistake, because I do think that using generative AI to write stories could be a career killer, not just for you, but for writers in general.
AI is not free
Writing isn’t free.
“But wait!” you say. “Writing can be free! I can take out a book from the library, and I don’t pay! And I don’t pay when I read a story online!”
You might not pull out your credit card and exchange dollars when you visit a library or website, but there is definitely an exchange of value. You do pay for it, but the payment is implicit.
For example, the library you borrowed that book from paid the publisher for the right to loan the book. The website you visited to read that story is making revenue via ads or eyeballs or reader subscriptions. There is an exchange of value. You are getting something (e.g. a short story) in exchange for the author and publisher getting something: a sale or ad revenue or even author “exposure.”
When AI bots scan artists’ works, there is no such exchange. The AI bot scrapers hoover up everything they find, but they do not give back. What does the artist gain when the AI bot scrapes her work and uses it to train an LLM? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. But the AI companies are gaining a huge amount of knowledge for free. And in all of that learning, did any of the artists and creators the AI trained on get anything in return? They did not.
When one party gets everything in a transaction and the other party gets nothing, and when this transaction happens without the stiffed party's permission, we call that theft.
The AI companies, in other words, are profiting off off others' work without remunerating them. If they did, their economic model would collapse. They are exploiting the common but wrong assumption that just because something is on the internet, it's free. This is why the AI companies are being coy about their data sets. This is why there are so many lawsuits against them.
They are stealing. It is theft. And if you use AI, you are benefiting from this theft.
AI erases your unique voice
I’ve heard of people using AI to “smooth over” their writing. They paste their draft and have ChatGPT “clean up” their work, fix spelling and grammar mistakes, etc.
Please don’t do this.
This is writing suicide. All the little gems of your unique voice reside in those little quirks the machine is silently erasing to make your work “better.”
When I took my first writing class at the New School in the early ‘00s, my professor told us to turn off the spelling and grammar checkers in our word processors. He said that so called “standard grammar” should be more of a guide than a rule, and that the best writers often break spelling and grammar “rules” as fast as they type. A grammar checker forces you into writing in a certain style, erasing your unique voice.
Each of us comes from different cities and countries. We know different slang, we speak different dialects. English may not be our first language. But it’s a unique voice that editors are always hunting for. A few examples:
Amos Totula, an African writer for whom English was a second language, wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It’s written in his local Yoruba English dialect, with hundreds if not thousands of grammar and spelling “errors.” At its release, it was called “primitive” and its English “broken.” And yet these “errors”, these little quirks, are what make the book so wonderfully unique. Had the book’s grammar been “smoothed” into so called Standard Written English, it might have been an interesting read, but all of its power, all of its raw potent energy would have been sapped, and I’d wager no one would remember the book today.
Another example: my friend grew up in Indiana. For him, the past tense of “drag” is “drug,” as in, “I drug his body through the mud.” A grammar checker AI would probably tell you to change that to “I dragged his body through the mud.” Sure, “dragged” is more “correct” if we’re talking “standard” grammar, but the first sentence tells me much more about the narrator than the second. With just one word I get an entirely different feel for the narrator.
When we write, we are making thousands of such choices, where to place a comma, where to place more emphasis, what verbs, nouns and adjectives to use, etc. It all comes from our unique experiences, our unique way of seeing the world, and our unique mode of expression. It’s these kind of subtle details that can take a story from mediocre to good, and from good to great. And it’s these wonderful little quirks that the grammar checkers are the first to edit out.
Don’t erase your voice. This is where the real power lies.
AI makes you a button pusher
When you type text into a prompt and the AI spits out a story, that doesn’t make you a writer. It makes you a button pusher.
If I ask a carpenter to build me a table, I am not the builder of that table. If I ask a painter to paint me a picture, I am not the painter. How then are you a “writer” if you put in a few sentences into a machine and it spits out a story?
Do you want to be a writer, or do you just want the credit? Because if you just want the credit then I have news for you: you’re not a writer. You’re a button pusher. You’re a poseur.
Getting good at writing requires hard work. There are no shortcuts.
You won’t improve if you don’t suck
To get better at anything, you first have to suck. This is true with any skill. Chess masters got mated hundreds of times before they started winning matches. NBA basketball players once missed more baskets than they sunk. Great guitarists once were rank beginners who couldn’t fret a chord. Writing isn’t any different.
Your first short stories will suck. Your first drafts will need lots of work. Today everyone wants to jump from rank novice to seasoned pro without doing the hard work. It’s a product of our culture of instant gratification and our fear of boredom, frustration, and hard work.
But it’s in the hours of labor, the sweating over punctuation, word choice, character, and plot, where we learn and grow. Sucking is part of the process.
When you finally do improve (and you will), and you sell your first story or book, the reward will feel that much greater, because you did the hard work. You are not taking credit for another’s work. You’re not a plagiarist. You earned your bread.
Lots of writers fear the suck part. They’re afraid that their work is bad, and they don’t want to put bad work out into the world. But writing sucky stories and novels is part of the process of learning.
If you want to get good, there’s no skipping the line.
The joy is in the journey, not the end
It sounds cliche, but it’s true. The real joy in writing is the act of writing itself. Yes, sales and success feel great. We’re social creatures after all. We like approval. But there are few things in life I enjoy more than getting immersed in writing, when the hours slide by without me noticing. It’s hard work, but it’s enormous fun. And you discover wonderful things along the way.
On the other hand, when you use AI to write or edit your work, you’re removing yourself from the discovery process, and also removing your potential for joy.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working on a story or novel when an idea or a revelation comes to me, something that perfectly fits the work and makes it so much better. These moments are joyful and revelatory, and I’d never have experienced them had I not been immersed in the work for weeks, months, or years. The end goal of publication will come, if you work at it, but if the end goal is only publication then you’re missing the point of art.
There’s joy and discovery in the process of writing.
You might get banned
More and more publishers these days are turning against AI. There are various reasons, a few of them outlined here. But the number of low quality AI-generated submissions inundating publishers is making them fight back any way they can. One way is permanently banning you from submitting to them.
Lots of publishers now have little checkboxes that say something to the effect of, “I affirm that I did not use AI to generate this work in whole or in part, and I affirm that by lying I might get banned from this publisher forever.”
Pure AI-generated submissions are easy to spot; they aren’t very good. Hybrid submissions, however, where the author used AI to “refine” their work, are not so easy to spot. And, sure, if you’re careful about it, you might hide your AI use from a publisher. But if you’re willing to do the work to hide AI, why not just use that work to fix the story yourself and become a better writer in the process? Why risk getting permanently banned from a publisher?
If you look at risk vs. reward, the choice is clear: do the hard work yourself. It will benefit you in the long term.
AI can’t reason and is often wrong
A recent study published by researchers at Apple proved that all of the major LLMs do not reason and do not understand basic logic. Instead, they are just sophisticated pattern matching machines that get confused and give wrong answers when provided with a tiny amount of superfluous information.
But good writing is almost all about that “superfluous” information. It’s the details, the nuance, the choice of phrase and language, the thousands of little choices, as Ted Chiang says, that make a work unique. If an AI gets confused by a few extra words, what makes you think it will have the reasoning capacity to understand your plot, character, and motivation?
AI creators euphemistically call egregious errors “hallucinations,” which is a sneaky way to get you to think that their AIs have a brain. But the AI is not really thinking at all. It’s just giving an illusion of thought which is highly prone to egregious and even dangerous mistakes, like, for example, Google’s Bard telling people to eat rocks to get their minerals. Even a five year old knows that they shouldn’t eat rocks.
Why would you trust a non-thinking machine that is prone to egregious errors and can get confused by minor details to “refine” or create a work for you? How is that going to make it “better” ?
AI goes against the nature of art
Humans are the only species on the planet that make art. Yes, you can make a case that other creatures we share this planet with make various forms of art in their own way. But no species I know of are painting cave walls, or making figurines, or writing novels. And though some creatures may have some form of language, none are as near expressive as the languages that humans speak.
We’re not telepathic creatures. I cannot know what you are thinking or feeling or experiencing. But you can express this through your art. That is what art is best at: conveying the complexity of human experience to another human.
Maybe that transcendent feeling that overwhelmed you during the hunt inspired you to paint the cave walls. Maybe the awe in watching your mother give birth to a child caused you to see the divine in her, and so you carved out a goddess figurine from soap stone. Maybe your love of sea and whaling and your encounters with obsessive men caused you to write Moby Dick.
And now, thousands of years later we can look at those cave paintings of an ancient hunt and we can feel our heart thumping along with them. We can glimpse that goddess figurine and recall our own awe at the divine power of motherhood. We can read Moby Dick, and even though we’ve never been on a whaling boat in the deep sea, we can smell the salt air and hear Captain Ahab’s voice in our ears as if we were there.
This is the power of art: to convey human experience to another human. And the most powerful art form, in my humble opinion, is the written word. Short of telepathy, no medium I know of can convey human thought so powerfully and succinctly.
Art is what makes us humans unique on this planet. We are extraordinarily creative beings, and our art reflects our unique experiences. We are conscious agents of experience moving through the world.
But an AI has no experience nor agency. It is not moving through the world with a body and a mind. It’s just a fancy mimicry machine. Like the myth of Echo and Narcissus, AI is just echoing back what we put in, obfuscated enough that we don’t recognize ourselves in the output. But it’s only us, jumbled. And we have fallen in love with our own distorted reflection.
Why settle for a weak, error-prone, distorted reflection when you can have the real thing? I have no desire to read a story written by an AI. I want the real thing. I want to read a human story, written by a person who has experienced the gamut of human emotions. I want to feel what they felt, and experience what they experienced.
An AI can pretend to have those experiences, but it can only do so by mimicking what’s been fed into it.
I don’t want weak, fake substitutes of human experience, I want the real thing.
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great points thx
the above did not use AI ^
AI definitely goes against the nature of art, and often enough it may also be (factually) in error. The other points are equally valid. Thank you for posting.