AI, Kindness, and Casual Cruelty

“Hi Anna, thanks for your message. I just looked up your website and now won’t be going forward with the interview. Honestly your use of AI with the book cover art and narration, comes across as very lazy and makes me doubt how much of your books were actually written by you! Just thought you should know. All the best, Luke”

I received the email above from a podcaster who asked me to appear on his show

You read that right.

He asked me.

In response to his frankly insulting email, today I’m going to talk about AI, creativity, and the challenges it presents. If you are an AI skeptic, or even a hater, do me the favor of reading this to the end. Count it as your act of kindness for the day.

Don’t worry—I did reply and set him straight. Funnily enough, he hasn’t responded. 🤔

ANYWAY… to say AI is divisive would be the understatement of the century.

AI companies knowingly used pirated books to train their large language models. They had the money to buy these books but chose to steal them; a conscious choice to do the wrong thing. If you’re unfamiliar, type “AI companies stole books” into your favorite search engine and you’ll get more info than you’ll ever have time to read.

Authors and creatives are rightly angry that their work was stolen and used without compensation.

According to the Author’s Guild (I’m a member) the median income for an author in the United States is $12,800. That about $4,000 below the poverty line for a single-person household.

Some make more but the vast majority make less. Not because they don’t work hard, and not because they’re not good or great writers. It’s simply incredibly hard to earn meaningful income in a saturated and competitive market with a product that has such thin profit margins and royalties that are, increasingly, becoming less and less.

Clearly, it’s hard to make a living as an artist. That tech companies financed by billionaires are so greedy that they wouldn’t spend $2.99, or even 99¢, on an ebook is simply appalling. Their brazenness doesn’t surprise me. Even so, it’s stunning. If they hadn't stolen these books and instead spent a hundred million dollars to buy them, it would have been a drop in the bucket of the money backing them.

Talk about sleaze on display.

This ‘original sin’ of AI is real.

Creatives who can’t or won’t reconcile themselves to this fact are often those most strongly opposed to AI. And you know what? They don’t have to be reconciled. There's no 'Must Reconcile Self To Having Your Shit Stolen' rule. 

There are other reasons people dislike to loathe AI: environmental impact, job loss, the flooding of online spaces with garbage, the general tech-bro insistence that every problem in the world can be solved by making everything worse, but faster! Tech-bros, full stop. 

I understand and have some of those objections, too.

But the genie is out of the bottle.

There is no going back.

And unfortunately, in the author community, AI use has become positively radioactive.

So it might surprise you to hear that I use AI tools to support my author business.

Like other writers I know, I use it mostly for marketing, an activity that makes me want to stick a fork in my eye. 

I also use it for research and sometimes for brainstorming. If I’m not mired in marketing hell, or if I can find or dismiss a direction for my story when I'm stuck (whether I use the results of the session or not), I can spend more time on the parts of being an author that I actually like.

Hint: it has to do with writing books.

Why am I going on about all this? Because most authors who use AI to support their business, and especially to co-write their books, won’t say so publicly, or even privately, especially to author friends.

Why?

You read that email I got, right?

A thirty-second search on Google or Amazon would have let that podcaster know that half of my books were published before AI tools were available to the public.

We’re talking years before.

Instead, he looked at my book covers—covers I paid an amazingly talented designer to create, and whom I have thanked and credited in all of my books—and decided they were made by AI.

How did he come to that conclusion?

He decided it was true, based on his own beliefs and prejudices.

He made the same judgment about the audio books I’ve released. I doubt he even listened to the samples, let alone an entire story.

Again, a seconds-long internet search would have let him know that Jeanne Marshall and Bobby Garrison are indeed people. So is Guy Barnes, who is working on the soon-to-be-released Steel City Apocalypse audio books.

But he didn’t search.

He didn’t ask.

He decided.

And then he called ME lazy!

The abuse this man dumped on me, wrapped up in a cheery 'Just thought you should know!' bow, is why many authors won’t admit or even talk about using AI—for anything.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing the people who churn out the AI slop that has flooded the book market. That shit is, well, shit. The AI slop crowd aren’t writers—they’re scammers—and we all know scammers suck.

There are authors who co-write with AI tools, which can mean many things. They might ask it to critique a draft. They might give it an outline and ask it to draft a chapter that they then edit, usually extensively. They might ask it to help them outline a scene, or develop the psychology of a character. There are so many ways people use these tools that I’ll never think of them all.

What does any author using AI tools have to do with my writing?

Not a fucking thing.

I’ve got my own books to write. And marketing to torture myself… Sorry, got confused. I’ve got marketing to figure out. I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to play writing police.

That fluttering sound you’re hearing is my last fuck flying away. 🦅

People say, ‘But AI will steal your books!’

My book have been on pirate book sites almost since the day they were published. I can’t stop that any more than I can stop the rain. If you get them taken down on one site, they just reappear on another. It’s electronic Whack-a-Mole that you just can’t win. META used some of my books to train its AI. I can’t change that.

People deciding they “know” what another person has done, used, or not used—based on nothing more than their opinion, prejudices, or bad information (remember em dashes being a sign of AI writing?🙄)—is so pointless. 

And harmful. 

It’s the sign of a person who needs to feel superior at another person’s expense.

It’s what my husband is fond of saying about technology: Garbage in, garbage out. If you input garbage, the output will be garbage. He calls it GIGO, because Lord knows the tech industry loves its acronyms. GIGO applies to more than computers.

If you start with assumptions, suspicion, and contempt, you probably aren’t going to arrive anywhere kind.

I’m not sharing this with you so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m not looking for sympathy because a jerk I’ve never met was a jerk to me.

I’m sharing it because I think how we treat one another matters, and how we decide what’s “real” and what’s “fake” matters.

And it REALLY matters when people confuse beliefs and suspicion with proof.

The development of AI is a huge disruption. It has harmed artists. It has also become a tool many artists use in limited, practical ways to keep their heads above water. Both of those things are true at the same time.

What isn’t okay is deciding you know the truth about someone else’s work based on a glance, a vibe, or your own certainty.

That podcaster didn’t ask. He didn’t check. He didn’t do thirty seconds of research.

He just decided, and that’s the part I keep coming back to.

Not AI.

Not even the insult.

The certainty. The willingness to be casually cruel because he made up his mind about what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘fake’ when it comes to creativity long before I had the misfortune to encounter him.

In my adult-life project of being as kind a person as I can be, I'm trying not to act the way that guy did. I fail sometimes. I might possibly be just the teensiest-weensiest little bit judgy. 

But I try to catch myself and ask: does this really matter? Does saying this make my life, another person’s life, or the world better?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

A lot of the time, it’s no.

When the answer is no, perhaps the kindest, most human thing we can do is remember that we might not know what we think we do.