The AIs are Coming
Hello Friends,
I enjoy writing. I like the act of sitting down and composing sentences. It’s how I most readily and consistently express my creativity. Writing words makes me happy.
All my books up to this point in time have had AIs in them as important characters. These are not the AIs like ChatGPT or Claude. Proteus and Robert Argus are not LLMs (large language models). They are the creations of fiction, characters in a book.
Disinformation regarding today's AI's capabilities abounds. You have seen some remarkable videos, undoubtedly. Please remember that these videos have been worked, reworked, edited, and sometimes falsified. Most of the sources of the representations of artificial intelligence belong companies that are trying to get billion-dollar valuations.
They are as slick and salesy as a big poster broadcasting: BOGO.
In my non-writing life (I'm a computer guy), I attend webinars demonstrating how I can bring the power of AI to my team—we write software. A technology called Co-Pilot sits right in the programming editor (Microsoft owns this and also uses the name for their office suite AI assistant, too). When a developer comes across something they've never seen before or don't know how to do, they put a prompt into Co-Pilot and get back lines of code that does what they ask. Magic.
But, there are 3 things about this to consider:
AI IS NOT NEW
The developer could have done (and has been doing for almost a generation) a simple Google search or querying a programming resource of coding examples (like Stack Overflow) and got the same results. This is one of the largest fallacies of current AI market. It's not new. As it exists today, artificial intelligent applications are just a more digestible search tool. And, to underscore this, Google something today. The first few results are AI driven. In reality, 99% of any programming a person has to do has already been done before. And you can extend this to any work that AI is currently doing. They are just offering a different interface and fancier marketing.
AI IS NOT SAFE (out of the box)
When a programmer writes a program or anyone creates a presentation or video or music, they have to do a great deal of work to make sure their creation is legal and secure. Coders can easily leave holes in their code that evil doers can exploit. Artists can violate copyrights. Marketers can mistakenly present questionable statistics. When humans come up with content themselves, they inherently do the due diligence. When an AI comes up with a creation, people still have to do the work to make sure it's secure: bug free, legal, accurate. I would posit that the challenges and risk of proofing someone else's work (AI or otherwise) is higher than your own—because you are the expert and the AI is just mysteriously spitting out data it has compiled.
AI MAKES US DUMBERER
When a developer or creator spends his or her day stitching collected AI-generated content, they lose the experience (and gained knowledge) of using their own wits to produce the material. And, I would suggest, create less quality work, in the end. Now, I'm not saying AI-generated subject matter can't be as amazing as human-generated stuff—that's not my point. It definitely can be (even with the weird hands and hallucinations). My position here is that it's not better for the humans. And this opinion is not driven by me having any AI vs Human moralistic argument—I don’t really have skin in that game. It's just that I would prefer to be surrounded by creative, experienced people. They are better problem-solvers in general and especially in those times when their AI binky is not available.
ULTIMATELY, IT’S THE HUMANS
In my first series of books, Proteus Unbound: A Trilogy, the AI characters more-or-less follow Asimov’s rules of robotics—no harm to humans first, self-preservation second. Today's AIs don't follow similar rules. They can be directed in very specific cases to respond in certain very specific ways, but they have no fundamental rules. At least that we can readily identify. AI developers have strapped on after-market guardrails, and other AI developers have found ways around the guardrails. (Truthfully, any new technology is often unruly until society catches up—so this is probably coming. But it ain’t here yet).
Because of this, as in my novels, it's not the AIs themselves, but the humans who cause all the trouble. (At least in Proteus Unbound. My latest book, Accelerate the Metaverse, is a whole other can of nuts and bolts).
Today's artificial intelligence has already been used for malicious acts: better spam and scams, political deep fakes, and revenge porn. By humans. Give a human a stick and he’ll just as quickly turn it into a club rather than a cane to help another human walk. The Internet is busting at the seams with clubs.
AM I A LUDDITE?
I'm not anti-technology or anti-AI; I have made a living writing software since before the World-Wide-Web. Lots of people use these tools to do lots of things. Good, positive things. And I will continue to experiment with them—in my computer work and maybe in my writing.
What I won't do is:
Ask it to write a book for me
Upload my book and ask it to write a description or marketing material
Help me get out of writer's block (I prefer the vices I currently use for this)
I won’t do these things because enjoy my creativity way too much. I look forward to taking a break from my writing to refill my creative well. I cherish the experience of discovering ironies in my plots and language as I develop a story. This is why I write. Letting software do all this for me just seems sad and a waste of a life.
I don't judge if you fully embrace artificial intelligent tools in all you do—to each his, her, or their own. Personally, I like my AIs as imagined characters. It allows me to explore the boundaries and intersections of technology and humanity while keeping a cautious eye on both.
Happy writing! And, reading. And, thinking.