No, AI Is Not the Answer (Guest post!)
From the brilliant author and writing coach, Ashley Mansour
I sometimes joke that we’ll need to put “human-made” stickers on our work in the same way we put “organic” stickers on produce.
AI is great for many things and it’s pretty unimaginable what it can become good at in time. But in the same way that sleep, smiling, and water have been in style since the dawn of humans, human storytelling will always be in vogue.
Over to Ashley to tell us more…
This past week I found myself deep in conversation with an aspiring author who had been needlessly relying on AI to help her write her memoir.
And let me tell you…
She was MISERABLE about it.
“I hate that I’m doing this,” she eventually confided in me. “But I just can’t seem to stop. It’s like I’m addicted to it!!”
Sadly, it’s not the first time a would-be author has sheepishly confided in me about their usage of AI and the utter misery it has brought them.
And it’s no wonder, right? The irony is calcifying. Here was this aspiring author, attempting to tell her story for the very first time. And where is she turning for help and guidance?
Well, as it turns out not just to me, a book coach, but also to the welcoming, all-access arms of artificial intelligence.
Yes, as unfortunate as it is, AI seems to be the answer for a lot of things these days. But I'd argue that actually AI is not the answer when it comes to sharing your voice and telling your story.
Rather than delve into the many reasons as to why I believe this and have seen evidence of it first-hand, let me just tackle one quick thing that bothers me quite a bit as an author myself and as a book writing coach. And that is the human propensity to want to rely—or over rely—upon AI for the most basic things.
In this case I'm talking about utilizing AI to actually communicate your lived experience for you. Doesn't that strike you as strange? How in the world would AI be able to interpret your lived experience into anything resembling your story? Have we gotten to a point where we trust technology more than ourselves with the beautiful miasma of our own existence? Do we now trust a machine more than our own minds to architect the story of our lives on paper?
These are real and valid concerns especially for someone in my line of work whose job it is to take the stories, lived experiences, and the memories of my students and help them transform all of those into books and to become authors.
It turns out with this particular author that the reason she resorted to AI in the first place was because she no longer felt confident in the way she was telling her story. She felt like her writing “wasn’t good enough” and that maybe, just maybe Chat GPT could make her “sound better.”
Yes, Chat GPT might have a level of “polish” and “poise” that many people mistake for good writing.
But that’s the problem. All that polish, all the poise… it’s too much. It drowns out the good stuff, the raw stuff, the real human stuff that readers yearn for. Like a pastry so overloaded with sugary filling that it becomes soggy and ultimately inedible.
Yep. AI is like the infamous Soggy Bottom on the Bake Off Show. It’s a no-no, a classic blunder.
Just like the pastry, everyone can taste it and everyone knows it isn’t great, but only a trained eye really understands why.
And that’s exactly what’s happening when AI tries to write your book and tell your story for you. Everyone knows it’s a bit crap, but only a trained eye can spot the AI faux pas like the overly formal, stilted language, the try-too-hard casually cool tone that no human ever really uses. And then there’s the gross generalizations, the factual errors, the hallucinations, and arguably the most problematic part… The Regression Toward the Mean.
In a nutshell, this means AI is always going to water stuff down and regress to the most basic content. It’s always going to head back to baseline. Use it enough, and soon you will sound like Data on Star Trek. Clever. Informed. Genius even. But not ever really human.
And that’s why I don’t want AI to write my books for me. I want it to clean my toilets, unload my dishwasher, and Swiffer the dog hair off my floor. I want it to do all of that so that I have more time to sweat and toil and focus on my art. So that I can engage in the messy, beautiful process of writing a book and come out the other side inspired, used up, simultaneously tortured and exhilarated by my creation, and all the richer for it.
Don't get me wrong, AI can be a useful tool for many things but when it comes to writing your own story, don't allow AI to be the voice that gets shared with the world.
We don't need any more artificial intelligence. We need more human intelligence.
We don't need any more artificial voices. We need more human ones. In the words of Roald Dahl,
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
Let's not forget that AI is our invention, our creation. It came from us. It is governed by us. And it grows and learns because of us.
So let's use it wisely. Let’s not rely upon AI to tell our stories for us. Let’s enlist it to do the doldrum tasks necessary for our existence like growing food, cleaning water, purifying our air and ecosystem, keeping our homes tidy and our cities maintained.
Let’s leave the music to the music makers, the art to the artists, the writing to the writers.
Let’s leave the dreams for the dreamers.
At least for a little while.
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Ashley Mansour is author of The Author Success Code: 9 Secrets to Write and Publish a Book That Will Change Your Life, available now!