If you’re like me and you love what you do, then you probably never even considered using AI for writing stories. Well, apparently that’s not the case for everyone. There was a controversy a little while ago surrounding a statement that NaNoWriMo made about AI. Apparently they thought it was a good idea to call critics of AI “racist” and “ableist”. That is a wild claim to start off with, but let’s dissect it a little bit.
In a follow up message, the moderators claimed that this was in response to a growing problem within the community and it was their way of making it clear that everyone should be welcomed and be able to write without feeling bad about how they go about it. That idea in and of itself is great of course, but the specific mention of AI – rightfully – pissed a lot of people off. To give myself as an example, I spent the past four years working away at my world, building characters, storylines, locations and filling up my world with emotions and care. The idea that a computer could just do half of that work for you while you just take the money and run is appalling. Writing is art. Just like how painting and music and sculpting and painting figurines and all other forms of expression are art. Art is so important to us as a species, it’s how we share our love, our emotions and our thoughts. It’s how we entertain others and make them laugh, cry and think hard about certain things. I’m not one to enjoy classical art, but I do own artbooks of some more modern artists. I love listening to music and the poetic lyrics that some songs have. Yorushika’s Hitchcock is about life, depression and not knowing why the world is unfair and it makes me feel a myriad of things every time I listen to it. Most importantly, art is very human.
Once a computer makes art, it’s no longer art. Which also means that it gets tricky for me to draw the line. You could argue that typing into a document that fixes grammar mistakes for you makes it less human because it removes the imperfections. You could argue that digital drawing isn’t the same as drawing on paper because you can so easily adjust things. All of this is – in my humble opinion – a bit ridiculous. Making use of tools to help us create our art is perfectly fine. If we need some assistance then we shouldn’t stop ourselves just because it’s not written with a quill on some paper I harvested from the neighbors’ tree while they were on holiday.
So yes, AI does get tricky. A lot of things we do in life already use AI to an extent, but we’re mainly talking about generative AI here. Where I can put a prompt into a website and it will give me something. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve used it before. It’s a neat bit of software for sure. Time to be a bit honest with you all though. I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for many years. When we first started playing, I was poor. I was a student and I was in debt. So for character art, battle maps and other imagery to use during our D&D games I would simply put whatever I needed into google images and use what came up. I don’t consider it theft, but you are making use of someone else’s art without them benefiting from it. Obviously I believe it’s very different to just make use of someone’s art compared to using it to make a profit, but that’s not what we’re talking about. When AI tools became commonplace I dabbled in them as well. I made a few battlemaps and some character art for our campaigns. I told myself that it wasn’t worse than taking an image from google search – and I believe that still – and made some pretty fun stuff. My current D&D character is still using AI art as her token, for example. But it also got me thinking. I don’t like the way that big corporations are using AI. They should automate the more important things in life and not steal our art from us. So what can I do?
My conclusion was that realistically there isn’t much I can do, but I landed on two things. The first one is related to my job. I know many of my students use ChatGPT to help them with assignments. I don’t think I can stop them and I don’t think I want to. But what I can do is make very clear to them that something the AI wrote isn’t theirs. If they throw my assignment into ChatGPT it is not theirs and I will recognize it. The second thing I’m doing is paying artists for their work. It’s the little things in life I suppose, but I stopped taking battlemaps for D&D from Google images and instead started paying for them. It’s not great, I liked having the money more, but I feel like I can’t sit here and shit on AI stealing from artists while constantly making use of it myself. I wouldn’t feel good about it. If you use generative AI for your own projects and have no intention to make money off of it then I won’t be judging you. Life is too short and complicated to get hung up on everything.
Let’s quickly bring it back to writing stories. What I love about writing stories is coming up with things myself. I can shape the world however I want. I specifically create worlds that are very different from ours where there are strange things happening and characters go through emotional arcs where they learn who they really are and that that’s okay. Hesitant Hero is about anxiety, depression, trauma and feelings of guilt. I don’t want to let a computer do all that work. It would take out the nuance and make it feel rigid instead of real. It’s my story. My world with my characters. Using AI for writing stories feels dirty to me. I’m sure artists feel similar about generative AI in their field as well, which is why I stopped using it at all. Art is something we should treasure and not something we should let a computer steal from us. I will stand by this opinion as I enter this year’s NaNoWriMo. The organization has rolled back those comments as well. I’m not too bothered about what the organization does, if it turns out they go down in flames I’ll just call it the November Novel challenge or something and keep doing it. It’s not the organization that keeps me coming back, it’s the challenge of writing stories, knowing that there are many others out there doing the same thing. A computer can write 50.000 words in a day but I promise you my stories are better. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 