On A.I., technology, and tools
My Tech Stack Statement
I have an official statement to make as an author regarding artificial intelligence:
I use A.I. tools and I love them.
There you go, that’s the statement!!!
Over on my author platform I have a FAQ that includes my “A.I. Statement,” from which this blog was pulled. I made it because there is so much hysteria right now in different quarters about A.I. tools, from the people who are terrified of anything remotely connected to A.I. to true believers who are right now sitting around awaiting the Singularity.
In the author community, the division has been pretty stark, sadly. I know just by posting this I will lose readers, fans, and possibly friends. That is upsetting, but on the other hand, at this point A.I. is just a tool and you can either use it or get left behind.
Many people are choosing to get left behind, and the flavor of this fear reminds me of people who refused to use email because it was untrustworthy and so only conducted communications by phone or paper mail. It reminds me of people who felt that their business did not need a website because the internet was a flash in the pan. It reminds me of artists I knew who made scathing, derogatory statements about anyone who used Photoshop for any reason.
I said then about those changes and I say now about artificial intelligence: it is just a tool, and it will absolutely become both unavoidable (like email) and necessary (like the internet) in the near future.
(tbh “the near future” is “now” but ymmv.)
Yes, I get there are some ethical questions about how the models were trained, and I’m waiting on more legal decisions to be made about that. But a lot of the argument “ChatGPT/MidJourney/ect. is THEFT!” is actually based on a profound misunderstanding of how LLMs work, so before you come at me, please read Monica Leonelle’s fantastic article, Did We Consent to Our Data Training Generative AI?
Anyway, my point in this post is to talk about what A.I. tools I use as an author, and why.
First, a clarification: a lot of people have come to believe that A.I. is chatGPT, or Midjourney, or Bing’s fresh new makeover. It’s not. In fact, there is no “it” there, as A.I. is a term used for a wide variety of things, much as we use the word “computer” to mean everything from huge mainframe systems to hand-held tablets.
Google search is A.I. The spellchecker in MS Word is A.I. Apps like Waze and Yelp are A.I.
You are and have been using artificial intelligence for years at this point.
So, when I say I use A.I. tools, what I mean is that I use a wide variety of software (apps) to help me do a variety of things, from research on sexagesimal numbering systems for a fantasy story to drafting marketing copy for social media to proofreading everything. Here’s a short list of some of the A.I. tools I use daily:
And all the built-in A.I. features in apps like Scrivener, Vivaldi browser, and my whole entire android phone.
Which is to say that what’s happening these days is less about chatGPT “writing a book for us” (it can’t; at best you have to wrestle with prompts to get a lousy first draft of a scene) than it is A.I. being integrated into apps we already use, like search engines and writing software and maps.
Microsoft is plugging A.I. into nearly every product it has. Google is already doing this, and in fact, as I wrote the original statement in a gDoc, I did not have to go to another tab to find any of the websites addresses. I right clicked the word “Bing” and clicked the “link” icon and immediately was given a list of suggestions on where to link to, and one of them was Bing’s homepage.
So, honestly, I expect going forward I will use A.I. more often than I don’t use it, much as I write more often on my computer than on paper. It’s just the way the world is going.
If A.I. scares you, or you think using A.I. empowered tools is cheating, all I can say is that House of York is not the home for you. I’m sure there are other places where people who share your perspective will welcome you! But I do use A.I. empowered tools, and I don’t plan to stop. Sorry not sorry!
Contents of this post are shareable/remixable via Creative Commons: CC BY 4.0
All the recent fervor about AI reminds me of the endless discussions and fear over Y2K. And with a husband who's been working in the AI field for decades, I keep wondering why now is it becoming a thing? It's certainly not new, and while it has the potential to be misused, it has some really valuable scientific applications.
Thank you for articulating so clearly what a lot of us writers think about AI but haven't been able to say -- for various obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.