Know thy enemy
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the anti-AI crowd, mostly because they’re so damned noisy. You can’t look anywhere on the internet without running into someone whining about something. And it is whining, however they want to dress it up.
Not a single day goes by that I don’t use one AI tool or another, whether for work-related purposes or just for fun. I love encountering new tools, games, or anything that employs AI technology in interesting ways. I honestly believe we’re living in a moment like the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. People were terrified of that, too.
I saw Sudowrite, a platform I’ve been subscribed to forever, name-checked in a New York Times article about romance writers leveraging AI to write novels for self-publication. Though the tone is generally disdainful (because, of course, it is), the real story peeks out when those who succeed at this have their say. As one author says, “Eventually, readers will not care.” And she’s right. Most readers don’t care already, and if they aren’t told they’re reading AI-generated fiction, they’d never know the difference.
Several of my books, including my work with James Patterson, were used as training data for pretty much every model you can think of, and I’m getting money as part of the Anthropic settlement, but you know what? It’s kinda cool to be part of the DNA of a new kind of creation. I can live with that.