Some thoughts on AI “art”

A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just that it was terrible.  I think it took a few months for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories” were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a first draft and edited it into a real story.  (Like all your story ideas are groundbreaking.)  But a few seconds after I had the idea, I wondered if life should imitate art and I should edit whatever the AI gave me.  So I found a site that let you get a sample of AI writing, and made a prompt along the lines of “Make a short story with aliens.” It started spitting out words, but after a paragraph or so I stopped it because it was basically gibberish.  Polishing this turd into something halfway decent would take longer than just writing a halfway decent story.  I know some will say I needed a better prompt along the lines of, “Make a short story about aliens in the style of Hemingway,” or whatever, but in the time it would take me to learn how best to use AI, I could just learn better time management skills so I could spend more time writing.  That is the only time I’ve ever tried to use AI for anything, and I never got around to writing that story.

Now you probably expect the standard screed against any and all things AI.  But I know that “AI” seems to just be a term applied to any fancy computer program.  Some of these may have merit, especially in regards to number crunching and pattern recognition.  I imagine someone having an “AI” look at tens of thousands of medical records and finding possible connections.  Like, maybe it would find evidence that having a banana a day cuts your chance of dying from a heart attack by 2%, but increases your chance of getting colon cancer by 1%.  This evidence, like all evidence, would need to be studied further in tests to see if there is an actual link or if it is all coincidence.  That type of AI I don’t mind.  As long as the medical records are used ethically and the results aren’t blindly taken as fact. 

The AI I do mind is what is used for “art,” and especially for writing.  There is a crafting-side to writing, which on my best days I’d still rank myself as below average, and there’s a business-side to writing, which I’ve largely failed.  My … disgust I guess at AI “art” is that they’ve cranked the business-side dial to 11 while also cranking the crafting-side dial to 0, or even -11.  In the time it takes me to craft a story that will make $X, an AI can “write” a billion stories that are all worthless, but each one only needs to make a penny or two for them to add up to $100X.  And in a world run by “More money is more gooder,” people, there will just be more and more well-crafted stories buried in a sea of AI slop. 

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I had an idea for this post, but it didn’t go in that direction.  So there may be future installments where I give my thoughts on other aspects of AI.  I’m sure you’re really looking forward to that.

Random Writing Tips – Blog lists

 

The basic reason I write these Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out on the internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that I exist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fraction of the money I make from my hated day job.  I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellow creatives.  But instead of just writing posts on random topics, I’m trying to write some that are loosely connected under the topic of Writing Tips. 

That’s nice, but why am I telling you that?  Well, I was trying to think of a tip to write up for this month and I had an idea.  But after thinking about it for a bit, I wasn’t sure if it was a new idea.  When I first started these, I kept a list of the posts I had done, but I’d forget to update it and whenever I remembered I had to add the last four or five posts.  (So, I have a Word doc for Writing Tips.  The first page or two has the tips I’ve started writing, and then there’s like four pages of ideas, and then I have the archive.  But I rarely scroll that far down, which is why I keep forgetting about it.) So to see if I had done the idea before, I had to click the Random Writing Tips label in the blog, and scroll through all the posts.  And while I did find that the new idea was new, it was very similar to an old idea. 

This took a few minutes of my time, which isn’t that bad, but I did wonder if I could do something better.  I also may have just needed a little project I could work on for a few days.  So I made my Random Writing Tips List page.  It’s just a list of all my writing tips, along with the day they were posted and a brief description.  So now when I get an idea, instead of spending a few minutes scrolling through my blog to see if I’d done it before, I can spend a minute scrolling down a page. 

Cool.  But does this really warrant a blog on writing tips?  Well, if you write a blog where you review movies, it makes sense to have a list of what movies you’ve reviewed somewhere, either sorted by release date, genre, however you score them, whatever.  But if you’re doing something as nebulous as Random Writing Tips, you may not think to keep a list.  And a list makes it easier for people to check out whatever tips sound interesting without having to scroll through my blog.  Will this list increase the chance someone will buy one of my books?  There’s no way to tell, but it can’t hurt.

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Image from Pixabay.