Why I don’t use AI in my writing

AI tools are everywhere and in the author, artist, and creative space online, they are particularly contentious. Many of us got into writing stories or drawing not for the money (trust me it is not for the money) but because we love the act of creation.

I've been making up stories since I was a little kid. I've been writing fan fiction since I was a teenager. I've been writing professionally in my day job for fifteen years. I got into it because I love storytelling and I love the writing process. I like making words come together, putting the puzzle of a plot together, falling in love with characters that feel as real as my friends in real life. My stories all have a piece of me in them, thoughts and feelings and observations of the world reflected back through a disaster in space. Or sometimes I just want to play with ideas or evoke a feeling.

It may not always seem like it from the final product but writing, or creating art, can be very personal.

For me, folks who use AI in the creative space and then call the final product their own feels cheap, especially because the AI is basing its output on work scraped without permission from millions of writers and artists. No one asked us if we'd like to train the model. AI uses em dashes all the time because, those of us who have had millions of words stories scraped use em dashes in our writing. When readers accuse an author of using AI to write, and the author has not, it hurts because the hours upon hours of effort, training, practice, and the months and years of creative energy put in by the author in an act of love is entirely dismissed by that one comment. We are human. It hurts, and we bleed.

AI is not going away. The technology is here and we are all collectively going through the growing pains of what to do with it, how to use it responsibly, and what the norms will be in our work, creative or otherwise.

I do believe there is a place for AI tools to help with tasks that can and should be automated. I've had it do meal planning for me. I've used it to help me research information on goats and electrical fires and how they behave (checking sources of course), similarly to how I would use a google search to find articles and websites on the topic. 

But the act of writing is mine, and mine alone.