KATI’S STANCE ON AI-GEN (TLDR: “NOPE”)

The use of AI-generated text and art is an issue that’s coming up more and more as online booksellers are being flooded with books that are essentially written by computers (or the covers are AI-generated). Readers are also questioning whether the books they are buying are written by computers, which seems a fair question to ask, considering that I don’t want to read books that are written by computers, either.

So, to my readers: I do not and will never use artificially generated text or images in my books or on my covers. Every single word is written by me (and will always be) — and when using stock photos, I do everything possible to ascertain that the image was not produced by AI. I do not and never will knowingly support AI-generated writing or art.

(To be clear, this is only about AI-generated art and writing. I think there are AI tools out there that are useful and helpful, especially in fields like medicine, or speech-to-text assistance, and so on.)

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t support AI-generated writing and art, and there are people out there who are far more educated in things like environmental impacts and intellectual property and the legal and ethical ramifications regarding big companies that are scraping text and images for their learning models without permission or payment, and what it means when people begin producing texts and art without taking the time to learn their craft, and how AI homogenization threatens to further narrow the (already) narrow definitions of concepts like beauty or “good” writing, and how it skews toward blandness and sameness and mediocrity. And these issues are important to me, but even if everyone in the world decides that AI-generated stuff is legal and ethical and writing prompts becomes a legitimate art/craft, I still wouldn’t use it.

Because the one thing about writing and art that is critical to me as someone who writes and reads and enjoys art, is that we try to express human experience and truth through our work and craft; we tell stories or write essays or create art that we hope resonate with other people or express something we want to say. We build communities and culture through this art and text. A computer can’t do that. A computer can’t contemplate all the different ways love is expressed, or how betrayal or isolation can hurt, and so it can’t tell you any truth about human life and emotion; it can only vomit back some text it consumed after recognizing a pattern, because that’s what it is programmed to vomit back. A computer has never known joy or heartache; it has only processed the words that humans have used to express joy or heartache and spit them out again. A computer doesn’t know what is beautiful, it doesn’t feel what is beautiful, it’s never had that thump in its chest that hurts so good; it can just analyze norms and patterns within art and text and try to replicate those things according to an algorithm that says, “this is what humans think is beautiful or true based on the data consumed,” but a computer can NEVER have that heart stopping moment of recognition of something true and intrinsic to being human. The algorithm can never see something beautiful that isn’t in the narrow parameters that it has decided is “beauty” — it can’t see YOU, or me, or any of us, because we are just bits of data, and our feelings are bits of data, and our lives are bits of data. And a computer sure as hell can’t recognize what is true, because all we have to say to it is “this lie is true” and it can’t know the difference or feel the difference. It never feels anything in its gut and then tries to express that truth — sometimes messily, sometimes painfully, sometimes stupidly (because part of being human is sometimes messy and painful and stupid).

What AI-gen produces is plastic vomit. It consumes human art and writing and thought and emotion and spits it back out — but doesn’t even spit it out in a messy human way*, but in an artificially packaged approximation of vomit. And maybe that plastic vomit looks pretty on the surface or even smells pretty, but BY GOD, I DO NOT WANT TO EAT IT. And I don’t want to produce it. Art and writing and stories and craft are all part of a human conversation, and why people want artificially generated vomit to become part of that messy, wonderful, human interaction is something I’ll never understand.

Also, if you use AI-generated writing in your books, then you should be transparent about it. If you truly believe AI-generated writing is totally great, and you’re proud of the work it produced for you with your awesome prompts, and you truly believe that you’re a genuine writer or artist, then DISCLOSE IT. Give your readers a choice to eat plastic vomit—or not. Give them a choice about whether to buy it—or not. To do anything else is dishonest.

I believe that readers have a right to know and a right to decide what they consume. I want genuine human thoughts and emotions and stories, even if they are messy. Maybe ESPECIALLY if they are messy, because it means that a person was behind that work, trying to express and convey a thought or a feeling, and perhaps they didn’t do it well … but failing to do something well is true to being human, too. And that struggle to express something, the attempt to communicate and be understood and form a connection that resonates with another human — no matter how ugly the result is — is much more precious than a million AI-generated works.

I don’t say that because I’m interested in conducting an AI witch-hunt, either. This is simply saying: “What you value about art and writing is totally different than what I value about art and writing, and I don’t want to consume what you are producing — and I’d like to be able to choose whether I do.” Because I don’t want a soulless, emotionless computer algorithm trying to feed me its version of humanity. Honestly, I would rather read the prompts that are given to the AI program than whatever the program produces! At least the prompts are human-generated, and it tells me what a human is trying to do and to create, and that is far more inspiring and interesting to me than whatever the AI program spits back. What are humans trying to say? What are they attempting to create? Why? (And why are they avoiding the work of saying or creating it themselves?) That’s a fascinating topic by itself — and says more about people than AI ever can.

Anyway. No AI generated work here. Not now. Not ever.

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*I have joked in the past that what I do is just vomit onto a page, but I don’t really think that’s what happens when we produce writing or art. I’ve also heard people argue that AI-gen does exactly what humans do — consume texts and art, and then we just all produce more work off of that, as if we’re all just regurgitating what we’ve consumed. But it’s not what happens with human art, not really. AI-gen can only vomit back what’s put into it, even if it makes it all pretty and mixes it up enough that you can’t always tell what the original source was. But humans consume, and they digest it … but then all those things they read and the art they see combines with the lives they live, and what they consume isn’t just jostled around inside a gut and spit out again; instead it nourishes them and makes them grow, and then they use their hands or their brains or their mouths (or whatever) to produce something from it. It’s not vomited; it’s transformed through their life and their experience and then emerges in a deliberate form as they create something new — sometimes messily, sometimes with the chunks of what was consumed still visible — but always transformed by being within that person for a while and interacting with all of the things that make that person themselves. It’s not the same.