Hello friends,
I have to admit, I don't particularly feel like writing about AI, but I know I must. I believe every reader today deserves some clarity on whether they're consuming an AI product or not.
I've just spent two years writing my second book, and it's pretty nuts how things have changed in this amount of time. You hear stories of indie authors using AI tools to write 200 books in a year. You hear of the marketplace getting absolutely flooded. It makes my heart sink, because I've been wanting to grow my author career, and I don't know whether this will suck up all the oxygen in the room.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no saint in this regard. I was curious, as always, about a new tool. I already had my outline for book 2, but I still used gpt—very occasionally!—to rubber duck my ideas. The awesome part is that it usually gave me terrible advice, but forced me to think more deeply and come up with my own improvements.
I used a writing tool that did a few kinds of checks for me, like grammar, finding run-on sentences or repetition.
This feels like I'm confessing my sins, but my stance is that I never want AI to take away my creativity. I love nothing more than coming up with plots and plot details. And in the last two years, I've made a concerted effort on improving my prose. Mostly, I let my brain do what AI does, but it somehow feels clean. I analyze the stories I love, and the prose I enjoy, and I try to understand how it all works so that my own writing can have a similar effect on others.
So that's it for me, that's my relationship with AI as it pertains to my work. I invest in my cover illustrator, in my writing coach, in my editor, in my interior designer. I'll compete, for as long as I can, with the robots.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you're doing well.
Mia