Welcome back! After some blog glitching last month (sorry) we are back and rolling for the 1st Saturday of the month and Insecure Writer’s Support Group day.

To sign up for the group yourself and experience the support, click on over here. Our trusty co-hosts for today’s adventure are Natalie Aguirre, Kim Lajevardi, Debs Carey, Gwen Gardner, Patricia Josephine, and Rebecca Douglass! Say thank you by visiting their site and leaving them a comment or two.

The question for this month seems very pertinent to recent events. It is: The topic of AI writing has been heavily debated across the world. According to various sources, generative AI will assist writers, not replace them. What are your thoughts?

Several writers have covered this topic, and all of them are much more intelligent than I am. Particularly when it comes to computer-y things. For example, author and former book agent Nathan Bransford gave us his Thoughts on AI and Publishing in June this year.

To sum it up, Nathan feels that AI doesn’t create. All it does is take what was already there, conglomerate it, and imitate it on request. It could assist writers with tedious things like copyediting or marketing . . . but the way it would do that would be by gathering the data imitating what a human has already done and that feels kinda squicky in the stomach regions to both Nathan and me.

And Chuck Wendig, whom I admire immensely, wrote a post about what he wants A.I. to be able to do (and what he’s not that stoked about it doing) in August.

Basically, Chuck wants AI to actually step in and stop a Roomba from doing stupid things related to messes on the carpet. Or find travel routes that use surface streets instead of trying to force you back onto the highway at every exit and also tell you whenever you pass a bookstore and where the nearest parking for it is. Or, since we’re dreaming of legitimately valuable uses, stop fucking trying to sell me something I bought last week just because the goddamn algorithm AI tells the store AI it was on my web browser. Stop spying on my web searches, seriously. It’s creepy and will only lead to trauma for any actual humans caught in the process.

Ahem. Anyway. I think Chuck Wendig puts it best when he calls artificial intelligence a “deranged copy-pasta pathological liar algorithm [] who can be tricked into snitching on you”. But I would also read the rest of his article, because it’s super entertaining.

Ultimately I feel like AI could be useful. There are tasks where it really is easier and faster to tap into the whole of human intelligence and find a quick answer.

But there are tasks — and creating something like a story, I would suggest, is definitely one of them — when the regurgitated knowledge of those who went before me is not what I want to choke down.