Some Literary Mama Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (AI)
It is all but impossible to avoid AI these days, even if you try really, really hard. I recently switched to using DuckDuckGo as my phone’s browser in order to avoid the instantaneous and automatic AI overview that pops up on Google Chrome. Yet, there are times when I find myself guiltily using Chrome when I want a quick overview on a topic rather than wade through various websites. Of course, I’m using these quick overviews for my own edification, not for work, but my shame persists.
Other Literary Mama staff are also avoiding AI as much as possible, including editor-in-chief Amanda Fields who says, “I scroll past AI overview, always. I don’t click on it. I don’t use ChatGPT. It is not worth it. Any person of average capability can do better than Chat.”
In my own limited experience, I’m not blown away in wonder and awe by the amazing things that AI produces, and Fields feels similarly: “My experience with AI has been that it’s a lot of hype that benefits almost no one but the rich and exists from cheap labor and sowing environmental destruction, and it’s always in our faces. I would love to go one day in my online work without hearing about it, or seeing it.” I, too, feel like it is being pushed down society’s throats, which only makes me want to avoid it. And anytime someone pushes something on me, their motivations become suspect.
Of course, because words are so important to writers and readers, they have strong feelings about AI, feelings that often are not positive. How could it be otherwise when we read about AI threatening livelihoods and AI companies destroying old books after using them for machine learning?
“AI is destroying critical thinking, the environment, and the economy. Every time someone uses ChatGPT or similar tools, they contribute to human job loss and water loss. Data centers are wreaking havoc on the Earth on an unprecedented level, and I fear we will never recover,” says Literary Mama senior editor Katherine Murray.
Literary Mama reviews editor Jean Schwab says, “I think generative AI is so pervasive right now because large tech companies are deeply invested in the technology and need it to lead to huge financial payoffs. I don’t think it’s because the technology has much use for most people, and especially not in education. It’s pervasive because of an aggressive marketing campaign.”
There is a legitimate fear about what the ease of AI is doing to young people’s learning experience. “When it comes to teaching someone to write, I think generative AI has little to nothing to offer. We grow as writers through the act of writing, revising, questioning, and sharing our writing with other humans. Generative AI offers a pale imitation of the experience of putting your ideas and writing to an audience and getting their responses. Chatbots do not push back or encourage us to rethink our ideas,” Schwab says.
But on an even more basic level is the question of what AI does to narrative. “What disturbs me most about AI’s intrusion into literary spaces is how it erodes and reshapes the definition of story. The generative AI stories I’ve read move from scene to scene, concentrating on the verbs and nouns. It forgets the richness of character. That story is not just told in the movements of a character through plot points but also in the character’s silences, why they think one way and act in another, and the little idiosyncrasies that pepper the pages with their personality. Stories encapsulate our human experience . . . and create the connective tissue between us,” says profiles editor Ty Mcleod.
When I’m feeling particularly hopeful, I look to history, at all the times when technology has changed the landscape of the world. Novels, at one time, were an unwelcome innovation that people thought would result in disarray and societal collapse. Of course, technological innovation also made the atomic bomb. Time will tell what kind of invention AI ultimately ends up being.