I'm so irritated tonight over the flood of advertising on Facebook for ChatGPT and numerous other Artificial Intelligence (AI) apps and platforms. I do understand that some elements of these apps can be useful tools for writers when it comes to cleaning up our text and catching grammatical and punctuation errors, as well as misspellings. What I don't understand is the writer who shouts, "Yippee, now I can write a book in an hour and publish it tomorrow."
You cannot write a book in an hour. And if you're simply inputting an idea, a few paragraphs or a chapter and instructing an AI program to turn that into a book, you're delusional to believe you've written a book. What you've done is plant an idea in the app that then harvests words and text from other sources and puts it all together for you. Nice and clean and neat--and heartless.
I saw a ChatGPT ad tonight that said, "You can have your name on a book in one hour." Well--yes, you can. But you're lying to yourself and everyone else if you say, "I wrote that book."
What has happened to imagination? What has happened to integrity? What has happened to doing the work, investing the time and energy into creating something you can be proud of?
There are those who say, "Get with the program. Step into the twenty-first century and use the technology available to you."
No. Simply put--no. First of all, I enjoy the creative process of writing my own books. Yes, it's work, often painstaking work. But in the end, it's mine. Secondly, I can have the confidence of knowing the words on the page came from me and weren't harvested from a library of collected books and, therefore, dance into the realm of plagiarism. AI programs don't have the ability to critically think about the moral and ethical side of things. AI programs don't have a beating heart and emotions to infuse into a story. Unless, of course, they co-opt previously written work that does have all of that because some author painstakingly created it in the first place.
To those who take the easy way out and allow AI to produce a book they then put their name on so they can pretend they wrote it, I say, "Shame on you. It's pitiful. I feel sorry for you because, in the end, you know in your own heart and mind you didn't really create a damned thing."
I'm not even sorry if this offends anyone. I work hard as a writer to create my own stories. You know what offends me? People who take the easy way out and then have the nerve to call themselves an author.
My father used to do Paint by Number kits as a way of relaxing. Not once did he hang a completed painting on the wall, tell everyone he painted that, and consider himself a Picasso.
ChatGPT and AI prove one point: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
I've heard people comment on AI as being 'dangerous.' No, it isn't. The danger isn't in the technology. The danger is in the people who are absolutely giddy at the thought of being empowered by the technology to take the easy way out to create art or literature and make money from it. The technology has no power until it's in the hands of those who choose how to use it. It's the same old battle of good versus evil. Or, in this case, integrity versus fraud.
Personally, I'd rather spend months working on a book that comes from my heart and soul and, in the end, have the satisfaction of knowing I created that book. I feel sorry for those faux writers out there taking the easy way out to end up with a hollow victory the rest of us can see through.
© 2023, Linda Rettstatt
