The publishing company Starship Sloane has relaunched the classic sf magazines Galaxy and Worlds of If. I have some stories in those new publications and there’s an interview with me in the forthcoming Worlds of If–and here’s how I responded to the question about AI in art and writing.
I have been in a state of existential angst for years now regarding the intrusion of AI into what I consider to be the sacred realm of human inspiration and creativity. What are your thoughts on AI making art and writing?
I feel your pain. I am part of the writing community’s class-action lawsuit against Anthropic AI which “scraped” our books, used them in a way that amounted to plagiarizing style and story. They used my novel CITY COME A’WALKIN’ and my ECLIPSE trilogy, and more. But they did this, I re-emphasize, to so very many others too. And Anthropic has settled for $1.5 billion-–but that’s to be divided between a whole lot of writers, when it is paid out!
I feel very strongly about AI “writing” as plagiarism and as being anti-creativity; I feel very strongly that any acceptance of AI as “writer” will lead at best to a general rot in culture, a sludge of AI-slop storytelling. It also screws over people who don’t realize they can develop their own writing better without AI.
Giving the AI a prompt or outline does not make you a writer. I believe that anyone who uses AI for the arts—and it’s happening in music and graphic art too—is being fundamentally dishonest, revoltingly lazy, and they’re cheating themselves along with the whole world.