The first Wednesday of every month is IWSG day. Come join in! You get unlimited amounts of insecurity, advice, a safe place to air your worries out, and cookies* (*they’re digital, but it still counts. Come join the Dark Side).

Our wonderful co-hosts for the March posting are Kristina Kelly, Miffie Seideman, Jean Davis, and Liza @ Middle Passages! Tell them thank you by stopping by their sites to say hello.

And the question for this month is: Have you “played” with AI to write those nasty synopses, or do you refuse to go that route? How do you feel about AI’s impact on creative writing?

We answered a similar question a little while ago, and my answer has not changed. To summarize, I feel like A.I. does not ‘create’ in the way we humans define creating. It does not make something out of pure nothing, or add a net positive to the negative space which was there. A.I. takes in big gulps of what humans have created, mashes them around a bit in digestive computer juices, and then throws it all back up. And I feel the exact same about consuming A.I. regurgitation as I would about consuming any other puke. No, thank you.

No, Sonny, it sure doesn’t

A.I. can be incredibly useful at doing tedious data gathering things, faster and better than humans can. Weather predicting? Sure. Traffic flow? Fine. Marketing and market data? Go ahead. Flight patterns and airline seating? Yes.

But when it comes to creative writing, or writing anything which didn’t exist before, no. At the bare minimum, using A.I. to write a synopsis would mean the technology taking other author’s synopsis to ‘learn’ from and then creating a word mash tailored to what I asked it to write. That opens me up to a lawsuit in the distant future when some sort of coherent policy had been enacted around A.I. and copyright laws. This is far in the future and no government has really caught up to the explosion which is A.I. But it’s still something my suspicious self sees coming.

Also? I feel like we’ve seen this movie before. And we didn’t really like the ending.