AI and Author Empowerment
A short post about preserving our humanity.
Any creation ultimately and fundamentally reflects its creator. That simple statement applies to a song, a piece of art, a film, a book, or a technology product.
Example
Take the latest Racket title, The Catalysts: The Accelerating Forces Forging the New World Financial Order. If you ever meet Amanda Wick, you'll quickly realize that her debut effort represents a physical manifestation of her mind—or about the closest possible thing to it. Ask her a question about any topic in her 430-page text. She'll gladly explain why she included it and how it relates to the book's other subjects. At no point will she say, “Because AI told me to do it.”
Because it never did.
Will everyone agree with her choices?
There's something empowering about making your own writing choices.
Of course not, but she made them—not a large language model that illegally gobbled up petabytes of data. What's more, her writing is exceptionally clear.
Call me old school, but there's something fundamentally empowering about individual agency when it comes to creative endeavors. To paraphrase Jane Margolis of Breaking Bad, it's better to make those decisions yourself.
Relying Too Much on AI Robs Writers of Their Humanity
There's no doubt that AI is helping writers in many ways. You'll never hear me say otherwise. Still, relying mostly or exclusively on it to write your book is a grave error. Apart from being generic, your final product won't reflect you because it will have decided:
- What to include.
- What to exclude.
- How your book is organized.
- The tone of your writing.
You know, little things.
And where's the humanity in that?