How is everyone's May 2025 going? Here in Utah, it's been raining, which is great, because we don't get a lot of rain most of the rest of the year. And with Mother's Day approaching, it's time for me to start up the sprinklers and plant things in the dirt. It's also time for me to segway to talking about the Insecure Writer's Support Group, and our monthly post. If you've never heard of this blogfest, it was started by Alex Cavanaugh to provide a group to share ideas about writing. If this sounds interesting to you, you can sign up for it HERE.
When do you Post?: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. So, that's when you post your thoughts on your own blog. You could talk about your doubts and the fears you've conquered. You could discuss your struggles and triumphs, or you could offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. To get the most out of the IWSG, you should visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writers. Some people go for a dozen new faces each time, and just like any other social media, if you return comments you'll get comments back. It's a kind of "As Above, So Below" thing. Some advice: be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.
The X (formerly known as Twitter) handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.
The awesome co-hosts for the May 7 posting of the IWSG are Feather Stone, Janet Alcorn, Rebecca Douglass, Jemima Pett, and Pat Garcia!
This month, I'm answering the question that's on the IWSG website. But you don't have to do that. I just find it easier because I've been doing this off and on for probably a decade now if not longer.
May 7 question - Some common fears writers share are rejection, failure, success, and lack of talent or ability. What are your greatest fears as a writer? How do you manage them?
I think that my greatest fear I had as a writer has already come to pass: that writing could just be done by a computer. Now, a lot of people can rightfully say that ChatGPT (for example) is a bad writer. And it kind of is. It uses way too many emdashes in its fiction writing, and it leans heavily on bad dangling participles, gerunds, and weak verbs. It also uses the incorrect preposition from time to time. However, I'm actually really impressed with it.
I'm not one of those people that has a "knee-jerk" reaction to offensive things and just shut them down. I examine them carefully to see what's going on there. Some people who saw ChatGPT write something instantly hated it. They declared it would never replace a human, insulted it as plagiarizing (which it arguably does), and that it is a terrible writer. And then (of course) they walked away from it. I'm not like that. I play around with it all of the time, and if you will take my word for it...it's learning. It's getting better and better, and the kind of prose that it's able to produce is really starting to impress me. It's actually improving at such a rate that it depresses me for the future of writing.
The same goes for ai art. I'm just going to say that it's really starting to impress me as well. It's creating pictures that would take me a week or more to paint in just a minute. So, I guess my fear is this: I wanted to think that I have something special that can't be duplicated. That's a nice thought, but it's categorically wrong, and that's a bit unsettling. I do believe that there's a sliding scale of course. I'm a mediocre writer, but there are some (maybe that someone is you) who are truly great writers. Maybe you are the next George R.R. Martin, Truman Capote, Margaret Atwood, or J.K. Rowling (the equivalent of Mozart in music, no?) If so...I seriously cannot wait to read your books. There's nothing like sinking your teeth into truly great writing and stories. But for the rest of us who can't quite reach those stratospheric heights even on our best days, I think a.i. is going to make us irrelevant.
However, maybe there's a silver lining. With irrelevance does come a kind of freedom. If you know that you'll never make a living at writing, but you still truly like to write, you could always say "to hell with the money" and write whatever you want. I'm doing this by writing fan fiction that I post on websites that use all of the Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property stuff. I use their monsters, their spells, etc. and just make up characters to go through stories. I'm not selling anything, and I'm having fun. So maybe the future for people who like to write when you know you can't sell anything is to embrace your creativity and just write fanfiction. You ever felt like writing a story in the Star Wars universe? Go ahead and do it. Why the hell not. Throw it up on some website that hosts free stories and start collecting fan mail. It's actually pretty fun.
A lot of us already did it for fun, and AI can't take that away. Although what happens when someone wants to have their book signed and it was produced by AI?
ReplyDeleteD&D is a wide universe, so writing in it could be a lot of fun. Like creating a game module.
It was fine until it started using everyone's books WITHOUT PERMISSION to start learning. Ugh. Anyhow, I have become skeptical about everything I pick up to read these days. If it isn't infused with human emotion or foibles, I begin to question if it is AI. There's something missing in every AI story I've read -- a spiritual component, really.
ReplyDeleteI do it for fun already, and AI can't change that, but I still object to my work being used, without permission, to train the AI (joke's on them--one thing they are using is an academic article I wrote as a grad student... NOT the writing style you want to emulate, I assure you!). But for me the even bigger problem with all the ChatGPT and AI art is... it uses a HUGE amount of electricity to run those things. SO... AI is a direct contributor to climate change, and that I cannot accept.
ReplyDeleteYeah, my issues with AI are the using work without permission or payment to train it and the environmental costs (of generating all the electricity to produce it). I mean, if it's going to put people out of work, the least it could do is to compensate them. I guess that's the big issue. Late stage capitalism. If no one needed to make money to live, then it wouldn't matter if computers can generate some of this stuff. Do it for love. Enjoy it. Without having to worry about how one is going to feed oneself.
ReplyDeleteThe writers who need to worry about this are the ones who write what anyone could write. I’ve said this before. So I suppose we might be in the verge of better material being published, since we’re going to have to be able to confirm that a human wrote it. I don’t think AI will be capable of genius anytime soon.
ReplyDelete