AI and "The Struggle"

 And the winner of the Dude bookmark is... dianneke!!!!

Email me at jennmck at yahoo dot com with you mailing address and I'll send your Dude bookmark.

JENN McKINLAY: Okay, AI is all we seem to hear about these days (if we ignore the war of choice) and I've had my opinions about AI from day one. We've even discussed it here before, but I think the prevalence of AI has gotten even worse since our discussion of Hallie's Generative What? post last September. Sometimes, I loosen up about its use and other times, well, no. I am currently in a "Oh, Hell No" place where I've blocked embedded AI (located in settings and switched it off) from my devices and refuse to use it in any form now.

I'm going to put aside the fact that Anthropic helped itself to 35 of my books, taking them without approval or compensation, and fed them into their machine to "teach" it. Yeah, no. Theft is theft. The lawsuit currently underway is offering artists a fraction (that they have to split 50/50 with their publisher, FFS) of what Anthropic would have paid had they bought the rights properly. Because of course they never offered to legitimately buy the rights as one of the grifting execs said, "That would be entirely too expensive." Yeah, no duh. I guess I'll just go take that new car I want from the dealership because paying for it would be entirely too expensive. Same thing, y'all. Theft is theft.

I'm also going to table the horrors of what AI and its required cooling Data Centers are going to do to our planet's environment. Wells polluted with forever chemicals, water made undrinkable, farms drying up, light pollution, noise pollution, communities forced to pay for a behemoth non job producing monster that tanks their property values as the cherry on top of the poop sundae. 

Instead, what I'm going to pop off about is the actual creative process. I'm in what I call "proposal writing season." This means I've finished all of the books I had under contract and am now writing proposals for potential future books. This would seemingly be a grand place to use AI. I could open up one of their question boxes and say "outline a romcom with XY and Z tropes with an organic farm as the setting" and it would churn out exactly that using my prompts and the more input I fed it, the tighter it would be. I could even ask it to tailor the proposal to the voice of Jenn McKinlay (I know it has the capability because it stole so much of my work). 

In fact, I did use AI to write an outline for a non-fiction piece I was asked to write last year. Non-fiction is not my jam and the outline was super helpful but it was a two paragraph OUTLINE not the article. 

Fiction to me, however, is an organic thing. It lives and breathes in the heart and mind of the artist and it can't be replicated by a machine no matter how many books by the author the machine has been fed. My opinion about this cemented when I had an epiphany, sometimes they hit like lightning bolts and this one did.

I knew I needed another idea for a romcom. I enjoy writing them, but they are by far the hardest genre for me. All that sticky authentic emotional angst is excruciating when I just want to crack jokes and avoid feelings. Ha ha.

The well, as they say, was empty, almost like a Data Center had moved into my head and sucked it dry, ahem. But then, when I was putting my loaded dinner plate onto the table, an entire book appeared in my head and I audibly gasped. Hub immediately asked if I was all right, and I shouted yes as I ran from the room to write down the most awesome idea for a romcom ever. Now, here's the thing, this idea came from a conversation I'd had with a woman seventeen years ago that my brain suddenly trotted out and said, "Well, how about this?"

And here's where the struggle comes in. The spark had arrived but it took me another week of thinking, plotting, revising, rejecting, and scribbling on random pieces of paper when new ideas struck at an inconvenient times, to piece together how this story needed to be told. Could AI have offered a million suggestions on this part? Probably, yes. But the struggle is the important part. I needed ideas to fail so that stronger ideas would appear, a process that takes patience and tenacity.

And that's when I had my epiphany, not just about the book in my head, but the entire problem with AI. Creativity is magic. It comes from the human experience and takes all the bits and bobs of your life or the way you view the world, both of which are unique to you, and crafts them into art in whatever from you decide, whether it's a story or a painting or a performance, and no machine can ever, ever, ever produce anything other than derivative slop replicating that creative magic. Only a human can create something out of nothing. A machine can only produce a subpar imitation. I believe we should demand better of ourselves and the corporations trying to crush us by stealing our creativity and destroying our planet.

Reds and Readers, what are your thoughts on this?