My problem with AI

Ain’t no AI here, folks

I’ve got a problem with AI and okay, maybe it’s just me. Not everybody feels this way. But this is me, and this is what my problem with AI is:

Way back when I was in art school and working on a sketch or whatever, and the art instructor came over and corrected my work by drawing directly on top of my own, I resented it. I kept my own sketches for a while but threw his corrected one out right away because the end result of the corrected one might have been better but the work wasn’t mine anymore.

I did the same with my writing when I was younger. If I turned in creative writing assignments and a teacher crossed out my words and inserted “better” ones, I tossed the stories because the end result might have been better but the story was no longer mine.

Maybe you think that’s extreme. That’s fine, but I don’t care because you aren’t me. I’ve got to live with me. We have different goals, and that’s the way it should be. My aim has always been to be the best artist and best writer I can, not to produce the best art and writing in the world. Some would call it shrinking from competition, I call it creating for myself first and foremost.

That’s why I’ve got a problem with AI. I don’t want to use AI to create my work and I want AI to stay the hell away from what I create. Unfortunately it looks like the Musks, Megas and MAGAs of this brave new world don’t care what I want. (I do have specific no AI/no scraping etc. wording on the copyright pages of my books, for what that’s worth).

Just sayin’.