Tuesday, June 4, 2024

No, AI Isn't an Author's Magic Bullet


Most authors don't subscribe to the notion of employing AI for much of anything writing-related, and they're right. If we're prepared to outsource all things creative, then let's just all give up and watch TV. 

I'm not one to do a deep dive on artificial intelligence, but I've read enough to know that the dire predictions of humanity's destruction are wildly overblown. We've all seen what happened when people asked Google's AI to create images of historical figures or when it instructed people to "eat one small rock each day". AI is only as smart as its programmers and obviously the programmers not only have cultural bias, but they're dumb as the rocks they want us to eat.

If AI can't manage to get even real-life situations correct, how can it be expected to deliver creativity? 

I'm told there are already AI-written books for sale on Amazon. I'm not a big peruser of books, so I haven't run across any, but there is no doubt I would know it when I saw it. What AI does, at least for now, is return generic, "logical" results. I don't know that stories are meant to be logical. Where's the fun in that? One could feed AI a premise, then jot down the most elementary story progression they can rattle off, and it's pretty certain the two results will match. Because AI doesn't possess imagination. 

Once when I was stuck for a book title I fed AI the details of my story and asked it for title suggestions. Ay! Whatever key words you feed it, it'll offer combinations of those words. 

"My story is about a woman in Montana who buys a motel and renovates it. Then she discovers she has a stalker."

AI: "Try these: The Montana Stalker, Renovating Montana, She Renovates It, Motel Woman".

You know, I could do that! Except I wouldn't.

For another non-writing project I needed an image of a man and woman singing duo on stage in front of a microphone. I searched all the usual photo sites and couldn't find an image that matched my vision. I finally decided to try AI.

Its results were "fun". Most of them were just cartoons ~ people with exaggerated features; caricatures, really. Except my project was serious, not a satire. A few resembled real people, but upon studying them, I'd find that the woman was missing a hand or that the guy had three arms. When I pointed this out to AI, it apologized, saying it's not good at doing limbs yet. 

I can spot an AI-generated book cover in an instant. Fellow authors, just don't! You're only going to present yourself as a crackpot who's too lazy to find (or make) a cover the old-fashioned way.

Once, when I needed a new story idea, I fed it a premise of, "A woman moves to a small town and falls in love with a local man. Please give me some possible story ideas."

AI: "The man and woman team up to save the local library."

Ooh, love that! What??

So, no, AI is not going to "save" the creative arts; not that they need saving.

Some authors employ AI to write their blurb. Yes, blurbs are hard, but they can be mastered with practice. What a blurb needs to do is "pop". Sure, you can do a chronological summary, sort of like a synopsis (without the ending), but you're going to put people to sleep. And that's exactly what an AI blurb will do. It's simply not smart enough to factor in emotion. That's because it's a machine. Deciding to buy a book is an investment, sometimes an intellectual one depending on the type of book, but novels are an emotional investment. The generic type of blurb AI can produce is like reading the tax code. 

With all things new, I like to give them a spin to find out what they're about. Who knows? That new thing might be useful. But to me, AI in its current form is just silly. 

And that's good news for (human) creators.


 


 

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