AI

For a time there, AI was in the news a lot: panic over the possible harmful effects alongside excitement over the possible benefits. Some people predicting armageddon, with others insisting the results will be … nothing much. Maybe even something quite useful.

We’re near the start of this technological wave, and it’s impossible to predict where it will take us. It will be significant. As significant as electricity and the internet? We’ll see. The technology itself doesn’t particularly concern me – as with any scientific advancement, it’s the people you have to worry about, and what uses they put a breakthrough to. Fire is great; it allows us to cook food and keep warm. It can also be used to set fire to things…

So far as writing is concerned, I use AI very little. I don’t use it at all when it comes to creating stories or poems, and I don’t really understand why anyone would. The act of creation is the fun bit; why give that to a computer to do? I can see one exception: if I were writing a sci/fi story about an AI, it might be interesting to use a real AI to generate fictional AI responses (hmm, actually an interesting idea). Other than that, I wouldn’t use one. Most magazines insist on no AI input in their guidelines these days, and that’s completely fair. I’ve occasionally asked an AI to create a fantasy or science fiction story to see what it comes up with – and it’s invariably formulaic and dull.

Similarly, my experience with AI narration has been disappointing. It isn’t good enough to replace a person yet, not without a stupid amount of training and fine-tuning. For fun, I asked an AI to generate an image based on the simple prompt “AI” to see how it saw itself (I’m aware, obviously, that AI’s have no consciousness or conception of self). It came up with this, which, OK, is actually pretty good:

It’s certainly far better than anything I could produce. I do occasionally use AI image generators to create graphics for this blog, but I’ve never used one to create a book cover. At some point, I might I suppose – but again, my experience of trying to create an image tailored to a particular novel hasn’t been good. In my experience, you just get images that aren’t right whatever prompt you use. AI’s are stupid. They have clever programming and a massive amount of data to draw on, but they’re a long way from being aware in any kind of useful way. The science fiction author in me thinks they’ll get there, but that may be completely wrong.

For now, in fact, the main writing purpose I’d love to put an AI to is to train one on the books I’ve written. There’s a specific reason for this: once a series of books grows beyond a certain size, it becomes a challenge to keep track of everything. Who’s met whom, what people look like, what they’ve previously said. Writing the fourth Witchfinder novel, for example, involves me constantly going back to the first three books to check on details. I’d love it if I could ask an AI, once that knows the previous books in a series – and only the previous books in a series – for some answers.

That would be cool. Definitely something I need to look into. Perhaps I need to ask an AI how to do it…