L.A. Garnett – Author

AI has been the buzzword of the year in all spaces, but especially in those involving creatives. From what I see there are two camps: the “who-cares” group, and the “AI is theft” group. There’s really no middle ground, and I’m firmly in the latter myself.

Where AI is at the moment, it is stealing the hard work of the thousands of artists whose work has been published online. Full stop. I’ve seen AI generated art that copies even the original artist’s signature in the bottom corner, and AI generated writing that blatantly steals entire paragraphs and passes it off as original. AI generators simply take information that they has been fed and regurgitates it, making it impossible to ever create original work using it.

You’ll never see me using AI art in promotions or my covers, nor AI in my writing in any way. Honestly, using an assist like that defeats the purpose of writing for me. It’s an exercise, something that is difficult that has a (hopefully) beautiful reward at the end. Some strange part of me enjoys the days where I can barely write 500 words, because they feel like an accomplishment once they’re on the page. If I were using AI to power through those moments, it would just feel like cheating.

Maybe someday AI will be advanced enough to actually be intelligent and think for itself. I still don’t think it should be used for art. AI should be doing all the monotonous tasks, the ones that distract us from creative endeavors. Humans are made for art—we should be freeing our time so that we can pursue it ourselves, not having a machine create that for us too.

What are your thoughts on AI? Let me know in the comments.