Periodically, people ask me about my opinions on romance and erotica, what it’s like to be someone who releases books, and writing in general. Honestly, I seldom feel qualified to answer with any great confidence – I’m just a guy who writes the books he’d like to read himself! – but, if I boil the question down to something almost-entirely personal, I can usually come up with an answer in some shape or form.
Recently, someone asked me why I don’t use AI, like ChatGPT, to “help” me write my stories.
Personally, if you’re spending either your time or your money, or both, on reading one of my books, I think you deserve to get a story that was written by me, a human writer. I don’t think “outsourcing” that writing – whether to a ghostwriter who also happens to be human, or to a computer program – is fair.
That’s before you factor in the huge environmental impact of AI, like the power and water required to run and cool the massive servers, and the ethical issues around the data sets the programs running on those servers are “trained” upon. At least a couple of my books have been subsumed into some of those data sets, apparently, and not with my permission. That means, if someone uses an AI to help them write, they’re potentially getting a recycled version of my creativity as the result.
(The flip-side is that I won’t use generative AI to make my ebook covers, either. Nobody is going to accuse me of being a great graphic artist – at best, you can at least say they all look like they were made by the same, mediocre designer! – but, until I can sell enough copies to justify spending money on a professional to make covers for me, I’ll stick to my DIY efforts. AI image-generators were trained on art scraped and stolen from human artists.)
None of that sits right with me, but even if I was okay with the environmental and ethical problems, I just can’t imagine wanting to divorce myself from the process of creativity. Sure, I may use a spellcheck, but the words it’s checking are the words that came from my own brain. The characters are people I’ve come up with; the conversions, and arguments, and flirting they have are dialog I’ve imagined. Why would I want to sidestep that process, and end up with a weaker, less personal story as a result?
Part of being a writer is having the strength of belief that you are the right guide for your own story.
I suppose, if I take a step back and squint, there is one way in which I can almost see the allure of services like ChatGPT. Some people have ideas for the story they want to see in the world, but doubt their own ability to produce it.
I think writing demands we have confidence in our own ideas and our own words. Not only that they’re right ideas for the story we want to tell, and the correct set of words for that story, but that we have a right to tell them, too. I’m very aware that I’m lucky, in that I grew up getting encouraged to come up with stories and being told that my words had value. Others, I know, weren’t instilled with that same confidence early on.
I guess I could see how, if you lack that certainty in your own decisions, having a non-judgmental AI to bounce those thoughts and ideas off might seem like a safe way to work. The “conversational” interface most of these AI products adopt – where it’s meant to feel like you’re talking to another person – probably underscores that sense that what you’re doing is creative collaboration, not creative abdication.
The thing is, I’m not sure AI like ChatGPT actually cures that shortfall of confidence, so much as shifts the dependencies around. If you can’t write without AI holding your hand, are you really any better off?
Writers aren’t necessarily patient people, and neither are readers
Part of being a writer, I think, is having the strength of belief that you are the right guide for your own story. There are certainly times when readers finish one of my books and wish I’d taken a plot line in a different direction. Sometimes those are macro things – they wish a romance had blossomed where something only physical took place – and sometimes they’re relatively micro, a slight annoyance in how a character reacts or a scheme unfolds. In the end, though, I made the decision that felt correct for the story I wanted to tell.
It takes practice to have that confidence, just like it can take practice to write realistic dialog, and sex scenes that don’t feel like a couple of biology textbooks rubbing together, and a plot that people want to keep returning to. That takes time, too, and so does writing a novel. Writers aren’t necessarily patient people, and neither are readers: I know I’ve been frustrated when a certain section just isn’t flowing smoothly from my brain to the page, just like I’ve also been frustrated at having to wait for the next installment in a well-loved book series.
I have to assume it’s worth that wait, though, just like I have to assume that reading a real human’s real thoughts and emotions will always be better than some MadLibs facsimile of fiction that’s been jumbled together from hundreds of thousands of blended writing samples. My books may be imperfect, and you might not always like how I choose to write them, but at least we both know that it was my human brain which agonized over the best phrasing or most devious plot twist on the page.
“If you can’t be bothered going to the effort of writing your story,” I saw in a rejoinder to AI recently, “why should I go to the effort of reading it?” Flawed or otherwise, I feel like I owe it to you, and to the stories I want to tell, to at least take the time to craft them myself.