Please don’t use AI for your creative writing

I’m asking for your sake.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Artificial Intelligent apps that create amazing works are exploding. Paintings, songs, and books are all being vomited out in milliseconds by complex algorithms. Just a few short years ago, such things were science fiction, now it is science fact. They have given us ‘tools’ that people could only dream of, and many did. Remember the amazing resolution-enhancing zoom feature in Blade Runner, or the fake news video of The Running Man? Now, there are many competing apps that can perform such miracles, and they are free for anyone to use.

I am here to call for caution and restraint, specifically for creative writers. Apps like ChatGPT are not spellcheckers. They are a fundamentally new and different kind of tool. I’m sure it’s super tempting to use them, but I strongly recommend resisting that urge.

I have no moral qualms about people using AI to augment the writing of dry, non-fiction articles, but when it comes to creative writing, the reader wants to hear your unique voice, not an amalgamation of other people’s appropriated, uncredited voices.

Here are two reasons why you should not give in to temptation, or if you have why you should stop and vow never to use it again.

1. You will never learn important writing skills or develop your own voice if you get used to a computer churning out the bulk of your content
2. In the future, you won’t be taken seriously when people find out you don’t fully write your own stuff and have no voice of your own

I’m sure people will vehemently argue with me and call me a gatekeeper or luddite, but that’s not what this is about. I think in the near future authenticity is going to become the main creative currency. That means not using AI to express your creativity.

More and more AI-generated, self-published books will swamp the market. And they won’t be particularly good, to put it mildly. Even some profession authors will succumb to temptation to speed up their workflow, leading to some high profile scandals as people lose trust in them.