Why AI Is No Good for Writing

Plenty of people are talking about it; I just edited it.

Photo from September 11, 2015. Somewhere in Savannah, but I have no idea where. Shoutout to Alice in Wonderland and Neutral Milk Hotel, though.

I’ve been quiet. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for various reasons. Aaron’s away for twelve days, and aside from just missing my person, the dogs and cats have been beside themselves. It’s been a real zoo in here with five animals in a tiny space. Plus the week straight of rain—which is actually great because it’s been in the sixties in the mornings here, unheard of in August—but also means lots of indoor rabble-rousing. Then, more importantly, there was the cousin dying, the panic attack on Monday that had me sitting in a stranger’s front yard until I could breathe again, the man one street away who’d been squatting in a shed who got shot and killed by a cop, and the middle-of-the-night migraine on Wednesday.

And then there’s AI. It’s a nagging, distressing scenario. I recently discovered that one of the authors whose book I was editing used AI to write some (?) of it. It’s a nonfiction book that relies heavily on the author’s personality. I shouldn’t have to say that, but here we are. I’d done one round of edits and didn’t notice it at first. But then I got revisions back and started seeing some discrepancies in tone. So I googled a few paragraphs. The search results showed me those nearly identical paragraphs in several random places across the internet.

I didn’t think this would bother me so much, but it does. Because it isn’t just about the tech. I think AI has its place. It can automate a lot of things that don’t require creativity or originality. Information aggregation. Streamlining processes. Organizing unwieldy data. Sure, all good. It can probably benefit us with scientific discovery, but I’m not altogether convinced the benefits will outweigh the risks. Basically, we’ll see.

But, in terms of my sphere of knowledge and expertise, I can’t see how books written with regurgitated information that, by the way, may or may not be true at this point, is benefitting anyone in the long run. But, of course, we’re humans. We don’t think about the long run.

What is the impetus behind letting AI to do the writing for you? Is it some deep insecurity about not being a good enough writer or a writer period? Then why the fuck are you writing and selling books? Is it about not caring? Just wanting to make a buck? And what about integrity? Because using AI to write is 100% plagiarism in a new form.

I’ll tell you what really fucks with me. Using AI in this way paves the way for the homogenization of voice and information—uniqueness is already pushed to the edges in our culture, now it will be unheard of. Just bytes and bites of same, same, same. When knowledge becomes monolithic and personality is one-size-fits-all—well, what’s the point?

I’m discouraged. Deflated. Demoralized. As an editor, for obvious reasons. I suddenly have to learn how to use AI to write so that I can spot it. There are some tricks—perfect 5 paragraph essay form with introductory sentences and too-clean transitions (things we’re taught to do as beginning writers but, fuck, it’s boring as hell), using three adjectives in a row, adhering to “historically, this is how things were” kinds of generalizations without citing anything real.

But this is now. AI will get better. I’m already finding AI detection software that will HUMANIZE your AI for you. I haven’t tried it yet, and I don’t want to. And every AI detection software gives me a different result, so that’s fun.

I hope AI will never replace real creativity, real writing, real art making. Because human writers actually grapple with life and death, the metaphysical and cultural norms, suffering, pain, joy for the purpose of understanding ourselves (singularly and collectively) better. I’m not sure AI can do anything but recycle those ideas that have already been voiced. But there’s the distinct possibility that we’ll be able to train it to do more. The shear number of sci-fi movies about this topic in the last few years can attest to that.

I don’t want this to be all doom and gloom. Since this whole country is a burning trash pile of that right now. And honestly, for me, this whole thing is more about being a writer than an editor. I could walk away from editing tomorrow and not look back. But I’ll never be able to not write. It’s wired into me. Making a poem, for instance, IS the joy. Not seeing it made.

On the other hand, I’m completely stumped about how to write horror. I have this idea that I keep tumbling around in my brain. I do not understand how to write fiction. But you know what I’m not going to do? I’m not going to ask AI to write the damn thing for me. I won’t even ask AI to tell me what I need to know to write a scene because it’s going to give me some bullshit five paragraph essay roadmap of what’s good. But, guess what? It’s not. It’s boring and expected and formulaic. I’m more likely to find a writer I like with a course or a book and fucking learn that shit the hard way.

Rant over.

Check out:

• My series of voice/echo poems called “The Beginning of” in antiphony magazine. This is in a manuscript called Dictionary Ecology that explores inner/outer wildernesses, climate disaster, apocalyptic landscapes. This magazine has a print version coming out in a month or so, too.

• Pre-order Agatha here. —Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia writes,

“Orgera's haunting, oracular voice emerges from a swirl of personal and saintly histories, delivering us to the mystical ‘green-dark’ spruces bordering life's most profound beginnings and endings. This is fierce and delicate work from one of our keenest poets.”

• A little something from Mary Oliver’s essay, “Of Power and Time.”

  “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”