This week I’m writing about sharing true stuff, human stuff.
It won’t be a long one this week as life admin tasks have overtaken me this week due to lots of family stuff happening. All the same, I wanted to share something.
I’ve been reading all week about the role of Artificial Intelligence in our writing, and it got me in quite a spin.
I’m not going to go into the Substack arguments of the AI checker, and I’m not going to argue one way or another against AI tools in general - everyone has their arguments. I don’t use it for my writing. That’s it.
However, I always felt that AI couldn’t replicate my own human experience and the things I write about.
This is true for most of my short stories too, as they are often triggered by things I’ve experienced, or seen or heard. That’s not to say that if I fed an AI all of the information, that it couldn’t churn out some kind of text or story, but I’m hopeful it would not bring together the threads that I do.
This week, I want to expand on that - the human experience and what makes our words ring “true” for readers.
I may eat my words - I hope not. But I am currently writing about true events and bringing my very truest human heart to what I am writing. I am entirely heartbroken at the thought that an artificial intelligence may write it better than me - or that a publisher or social media platform might think so.
I don’t write perfectly, but my age means I learned from many of the same texts that the AI machines have gobbled up (for free), so my writing may follow similar patterns. Fiction itself is very difficult for AI to evaluate as it uses repetition and mirrors and lyrical devices.
How awful if an AI might somehow convey the magical elements that wind their way through our human experience and stories, and how sad that readers may not recognise the difference. At the moment, I usually can recognise the difference. Can you?
If you are relying on Substack’s detect AI button, then perhaps you need to read more widely? (respectfully said).
If only such tools could rid us of the accounts that regurgitate photos and statements from other places, you know, the stuff that blocks up our feeds every day! That wouldn’t be a reader to reader tool, it should be Substack itself cleaning stuff up!
You’ll have to excuse me this week, I’m working on a few deadlines and sailing very close to the wind with them (is that the correct metaphor? - AI would know).
Part of the reason is that I keep trying to perfect and alter and edit and …on and on it goes. An AI wouldn’t have to do that. They’d have had this entry in days ago.
Still, I’m nearly late with my deadlines, because I have one thousand and one files all with similar names, because I’ve edited so much.
HELP!
(No AIs may apply)
That’s all from Jackie in the Little Writing Corner this week because life’s complicated when you’re not a robot AI. x x x
