Tag Archives: #AI

I Don’t Need to Compete With AI (artificial intelligence)

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AI is doing this

AI is taking over that

AI is going to wipe us all out

It seems all you hear about AI is that AI is taking over, has taken over, and there is nothing us dumb-ass humans can do about it. Well, us dumb-ass humans invented this technology so it’s sloppy and imperfect and sooner or later, bound to fuck things up like it already has, and just like us real flesh-and-blood humans still do on a regular basis. So what’s a poor flesh-and-blood human slob to do?

My response is this: I don’t need to compete with AI.

Why?

Because I’m already being used to train it, and AI is only as smart as the material it scrapes up from the internet. But here’s the thing: AI doesn’t discern whether material is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or ‘quality’ material. It doesn’t seem to know how to fact-check something from multiple sources. It just spits out what it thinks users want to hear.

Case in point: the first sentence of the above paragraph was tagged by the spelling/grammar check in the Microsoft Word program I use to write. It tagged ‘being used’ and ‘train’ and asked me if I was using the correct verb tense. Yes, I am because I wanted to say that AI is actively using me to train itself on but since I’m writing in the first-person here, it doesn’t seem to understand singular present-tense verbiage here. This is why I will look at what the spelling/grammar check is highlighting and sometimes I will correct it but that’s my choice, not the program’s.

If anyone accuses me of using AI to write or edit, I’m going to laugh in their faces then tell them to fuck off straight to Hell. I don’t just write in a colorful funky way to piss off or throw off AI, but because I choose to write and talk this way. I choose to use sentence structure that may not be ‘perfect’ but I can proofread quite well on my own. And yes, I will claim an attitude here because I was writing and proofreading long before I started using word processing software. And I don’t trust software completely as I know it’s as flawed as I can be, and that technology is only as good as the people who create it, program it, and use it.

One of the current crop of tech-bro billionaire assholes recently said that neurodivergent people will survive the coming of AI. I was like, “Fuck yes!” And you know why? Because neurodivergent people like me don’t think in a straight line, or logically, and we’re not boring. We’re annoying as fuck sometimes, or a lot of the time, and we’re not perfect as our neurodivergent brains can fuck our lives up pretty well. But I think we’re genuine survivors because we see things that boring dumb-ass neurotypical people don’t see, like patterns and other things that are right in front of us but neurotypical people are blind to. It’s why intelligence agencies recruit neurodivergent kids out of high school into intelligence analysis because a good intelligence analyst can see patterns where most people can’t.

But the current crop of tech-bro billionaire assholes don’t like people who see through their bullshit because most of these guys are just hustlers and con-men. Most of them don’t really know the nuts-and-bolts of what they’re peddling and don’t really care because despite all their grandiose visionary garbage they spout, they really don’t know how things work. And most of all, I really think they hate the neurodivergent half of the human population because they know they’re going to need us neurodivergent weirdos to solve their fucking problems.

In the end, I don’t see myself competing with AI at all. As a writer this is something I see a lot of discussion about how to write when you’re competing with AI slop. Humans are not ‘competing’ with AI slop because AI slop is being generated by lazy con-artist scamming humans. And I don’t compete with criminals and jack-asses. So I’m just going to keep on writing in my own way, fucking clauses and phrases up not just to throw the AI into a steaming tizzy, but because I like to write this way. I like to be unique, colorful, and I have made peace with the fact that I’m an imperfect slob with a propensity for profanity.

So if AI wants to scrape what I’m doing here, have at it. But talking like this takes practice, and an attitude of ‘I truly don’t give a shit’. Because when a woman of my age says she doesn’t care, like I do, she means it. I don’t fucking care that this world is fucked up because there’s not a lot I can do about it other than live my life to the best of my ability, and keep on writing in my own way.

And I’ve seen all the eighties movies were AI takes over and blows everything to Hell and the survivors have to navigate a post-nuclear apocalyptic zombie-filled wasteland, which is why I want to get a van and kit it out to where I can live off the grid if I have to.

From Analog to Digital to AI: Been There, Done That, and Here We Go Again

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The discussion over using AI technology, especially in the creative fields can be pretty heated. I understand where the heat comes from and I agree with people who hate the thought of people using AI as a shortcut to churn out slop.

Now, before I go any further, I have never used ChatGPT or any type of AI system to write or generate art or graphics. The pictures I use here are my own, royalty-free images, and the ones without pictures are just me using PowerPoint to create a background then choosing a font before adjusting everything to get it to look the way I want it to. My words are my own, and my word pictures are my own work.

But here’s the thing: AI has been scrapping the internet for years, something that has been well known. I know my content here on my website has been scrapped into some AI program somewhere and I hope it didn’t go down too well. I hope my chopped salad structure as I like to call it along with my propensity for profanity makes AI burp up sour and hot. But the only thing I can do to keep my work out of AI is not to post it at all and that’s not something I’m willing to do, nor something I feel like I have to do.

The discussion around AI and its’ uses and abuses is a hot one but welcome to the internet and social media, both of which are designed to heat shit up and burn it. This isn’t a slash-and-burn hit piece on the evils of AI because I know what those are because I grew up watching eighties sci-fi movies. And AI is only as good as the people that program it, and the material that it consumes, and well, as I like to say, fifty percent of the human population is functionally stupid most of the time on a good day.

What this conversation around AI feels like to me are the conversations I heard when the world transitioned from analog to digital and even before that. Go back a hundred years or so and you have the transition from silent movies to talkies, go back eighty years or so and you have the rise of television. Go back fifty years or so and you have the rise of cable television and videocassette recorders. Go back forty years or so and you have the transition from analog tape recording to digital, and the rise of computer-generated special effects in movies. Then there was the rise of word processing, accounting, and other software and the rise of personal computers. And every single time, you had people yelling about how the sky was falling and everything was going to go to shit.

Yet here we are. Because the sky will only fall if we blast ourselves into nuclear oblivion or the zombie apocalypse hits us all. Other than that, we’ll limp along technology-wise slower than a lot of people realize. Evil corporations are run by metric-centric morons with no real intelligence or problem-solving skills, and therefore most of their employees just run shit around them like I used to back in my corporate call-center hell days.

And as for AI taking over everything creative… if that’s the case, why do people still create and put out original work? I mean, shouldn’t we all just give it up and give in to our AI overlords? Because when I see people froth at the mouth about AI creating everything while still seeing a shit-ton of original work, I think the people frothing at the mouth are wasting time and energy on the wrong thing. I understand how creative people are pissed about their work being used without their permission and not compensated because that’s more than justified. But that horse is long gone from the barn, and instead maybe we can try to round up those horses and figure out a way to compensate people for their work.

The reason I won’t tell people they can or can’t use AI is because their use, or non-use of AI won’t stop me or anyone else from creating our own work. And no, it won’t push us out either because unless AI becomes an out-of-control zombie virus, that’s not going to happen any time soon. The human need, or urge, or whatever the heck you want to call it to create won’t be stamped out or destroyed by AI, or even nuclear war or zombies because as long as humans live and breathe, there will be a need or an urge to create. For creative people, that need, or that urge, is as natural to us as breathing, and we make a choice whether or not to create and share our creativity because The Matrix hasn’t taken over yet either.

Frankly, my cynicism is kicking in yet again and also I’m hearing the same things about AI generated content and how people shouldn’t use it, and blah, blah, blah. I won’t use AI to write or create art because I don’t know exactly what I want until I start working on it then I tweak and edit the crap out of something until I do get that perfect hit. No AI is going to stop me from doing that so at this point in time, get back to work on your own stuff. And toss in some f-bombs like I do to give AI some indigestion if you want to. 😊    

Behind the Story – Genuine Creativity and Writing Is Not for AI

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This is a link to the National Novel Writing Month organization’s statement on the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in writing.

First, I want to make a distinction between ‘Generative’ and ‘Non Generative’ or Adaptive AI as I will call it going forward here. My way of defining these two terms would be like this:

Adaptive AI is when you use writing program software, like I’m using Microsoft Word to write this in, and it highlights typos, generates words based on what you’re typing, and highlights phrasing that may have an error in it that it can, and sometimes, can’t quite identify. Now these settings can  be adjusted in software programs, ignored, or the writer can go along with them or not. But the actual content is being written by a human, such as myself.

I’ve been writing with Microsoft Word for over twenty years and although its’ spelling and grammar-checking capabilities have improved a lot over the years, it’s still not perfect. It doesn’t catch all the typos or grammar goof-ups, and it isn’t great with dialect or even missing words sometimes. I still do the work of proofreading and editing and rewriting my own work as I have since I started out with paper and pencil thirty-plus years ago.

Generative AI is when you put in a topic to a Generative AI program (like Chat GPT or Pro Writer Aid) and ask it to give you something in return. The AI program is ‘generating’ the content, not you, the human..

If a writer wants to use Generative AI, that’s their choice since the software is out there already. But Generative AI software was created using content scraped from the internet without any prior permission obtained from the authors of the material. The legality of this is being worked out and it will take years to settle but the damage has been done. So in my opinion, Generative AI is a form of plagiarism because the material generated was taken from the original authors without their permission.

Now some readers may ask: what if a writer has difficulty generating ideas?

There are plenty of good resources out there to help someone generate ideas and stimulate their creativity. I understand most people don’t have an incredibly overactive imagination like I do and do have difficulty generating ideas and storylines and characters. But like I said, Generative AI does that using stolen material. Find ways to generate your own ideas and storylines and characters without resorting to a machine programmed on stolen material. And yes, these resources are available at little to no cost via the internet and the public library system, and also by making friends with fellow writers to create groups of people you can brainstorm and help develop ideas with.

Creativity is hard. It may look easy, and at times, it may come easy. But those easy times are few and far between, and usually come after a lot of hard work and practice. Yes, some people have a natural talent, or aptitude for things but to be successful, you have to put in the work. Any person at the top is there not just because of talent, but because of hard work and perseverance.

So how do I feel when people complain about doing this hard work and with no guarantee of success so they should use Generative AI to help them along?

Well, the achingly-polite Southern lady in me would say, “Bless their hearts.” Because that is the ultimate insult to someone whining and complaining about having to do some work in order to learn and possibly, get good at something.

Another question I want to address is using Adaptive AI in the editing/revision process. Some people are saying that if you can’t afford to hire a professional to help you edit your work that you have to use software. I’m okay with using the software but human eyes are still the best so if you can’t afford to hire them, find people who will help you for free. This is why writing communities have come together to help and support each other. Also, maybe you can find a way to raise the money to hire editorial help.

Don’t make excuses. Do the work.

Creativity doesn’t come out of a machine, nor is it easy to do on your own. Some people have more creative energy than others. But for those of us with high amounts of creative energy, trust me, we do the work to make that energy come alive and make the best work we can.