What a fun time we live in. Artificial Intelligence is starting to make its mark on the world, to the point where it feels like we’re entering the early stages of a sci-fi story. I wouldn’t mind having a droid around to fix the car, or make me a sandwich, but not sure I want it writing my stories. The artist world is shook up, and in particular writers, as AI tools become faster, better, stronger. There are “authors” spamming Amazon with low content books and short form online publishers are overwhelmed with AI written stories. Others are using AI for prompts and writing initial sections of “their” tales or creating character bios. Where’s the line of personal experience and emotion being removed to create content just to sell and call yourself an author? Does it matter if AI wrote a book if it’s actually good quality and tells a story people can relate too?
I’m getting old in my old age and with that comes some curmudgeon tendencies with new technology. I scoff, and grumble, and say stuff like ‘back in my day we used to write stories with wooden laptops’ or something along those lines. But then I see value in offloading tasks to AI like writing ad copy (as someone that is not an ad guy and doesn’t enjoy doing that stuff…sure AI do it), or using AI to find comps for a book. I think there’s a line but only time will tell how far across that line we’ll go, some are well over it. Anyways, in the latest Writer Syndrome episode Tim and I rant and rave like one does when technology encroaches their medium. Imagine when the camera was invented, the painter probably said, who wants an artificial image when I can spend weeks painting a family portrait!! Fun times.
