Like many people, I’ve been on a bit of a journey with AI. As a technology (or range of technolgies), it can clearly be put to many uses – some good, some bad. Fire can keep us warm or burn us, depending how we use it. There are, clearly, a lot of specialisms where a narrowly-focused and well-written AI can be more reliable and dependable than a human, which would surely make its use a good thing if it means lives can be saved.
But general AI seems to me to be shockingly bad. I’m no Luddite, but my attitudes have certainly hardened against it. For one thing, it’s wrong far too often. If I have to check everything it tells me, what’s the point of it? And when it comes to creating something human, a piece of fiction or a painting or whatever, I think AI is, at worst, actively malign, essentially taking work away from real people and giving more money and power to tech companies.
So, just for the avoidance of doubt, I have never and will never use AI in my writing, book covers etc. I did briefly experiment with AI audiobook generation, as discussed previously, but I found it really poor and I reverted to human-narration pretty quickly. We live and learn.
l have used several AIs in the writing of my current science fiction book, The Twisted Road. But you’ll be pleased to know they’re all entirely fictitious, their “output” lovingly crafted by a real human (me) as part of the story text. In my own small way I like to think I’m taking away jobs from AIs.
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