The Case for AI in the Creative Life
Or how I went from shunning AI like it was from the literal devil to making friends with it (enemies-to-grudging-lovers-style)
Hello and welcome to Fellowship of the Inklings. My name is Tiffany, and I write personal essays crafted to give you a unique perspective connecting obscure ideas to real life.
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Dear Inklings,
Back in the day, the four members of my family had to share usage of the Internet, which depended on a connection to our phone line. In those days, connecting to the World Wide Web involved a now-difficult-to-describe screeching dial-up static and digital beep-bopping we had to wait upon with bated breath. God forbid someone try to phone our house with an emergency when someone had finally connected.
We’ve come a long way since those days.
Today, we come to it at last—the great battle of our time. We are talking about generative A.I.
When ChatGPT became mainstream, writers flooded the Facebook groups with hysteria and rage. “These machines will replace us!” was the general outcry, followed by, “Anyone who uses AI is undermining the creative process and can’t be a **true** writer,” and “How dare they?!”
In other words, the onset of the generative AI age has instigated an existential crisis unlike any artists have known before. It’s no wonder that the mere mention of the two little letters A.I. in many online forums is like inviting the mob to stone you.
—
, Finding My Voice in the AI Wars
As someone who is quite resistant to technology, I paid little attention to these comments. I, of course, would not be using generative AI anyway. I would avoid it the same way I’ve avoided Siri, Alexa, and all the other “smart” devices and software.
Alas, AI insisted on encroaching, regardless of my personal feeling.
The unpleasant thought arose: “There is no escaping this.”
I knew nothing about generative AI
But when I started learning about it, my views shifted.
I’m a recent listener of Joanna Penn’s podcast, The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers, which I’ve shared about a few times now, thanks to
(who also wrote about AI). She describes herself as “AI-positive” and is open about how she has incorporated AI tools into her own workflow.I knew next to nothing about AI and looked upon it with deepest loathing and distrust (as I do pretty much any new piece of technology). My curiosity grew after listening to how Joanna uses ChatGPT and Claude to write marketing blurbs and cover letters.
“Ok,” I thought, “I hate writing those too; maybe there’s something it could be used for that won’t involve selling my soul.”
Reading her excellent article, The AI-Assisted Artisan, and listening to How AI Tools Are Useful for Writers with Disabilities and Health Issues with S. J. Pajonas and How Generative AI Search Will Impact Book Discoverability In The Next Decade further softened my feelings. My perspective started shifting from “AI is evil incarnate out to compete with proper artists” to “if used responsibly, AI could be a useful tool.”
writes, “Art is a way for humans to express themselves. Anything that allows humans to do that is a tool, not an artist.”On that note, after having tried out a couple generative AI models, I have concluded that while it’s certainly possible AI will get better and better at “writing,” it still requires human creativity to produce something “good.”
This is something I think people who haven’t used it don’t understand at all because I didn’t either. You don’t just throw out some random words as a prompt and tada, AI will cook up some brilliant piece of art or writing. It takes a human’s creativity to give specific prompts, often long, arduous prompts, followed by even-longer tweaking, to get what you envisioned. The idea is the human’s. The human uses a specific set of instructions to direct a machine to produce what the human wants.
wrote a beautiful novella about a cyborg writer whose retained humanity sets her apart from other, fully robotic machines. In our new age of AI, emphasising what makes us human is what will lift us above the soulless clamour.Side note: Regardless of whether it's AI-generated or not, some writing can only be characterized as "soulless," and readers can completely sense when something lacks heart.
But Tiffany, what about the ethics?
Ah, that’s where things get a bit murkier for me, especially after several authors found that OpenAI (ChatGPT) had used their work to train AI models without permission or compensation.
In September 2023, it came to light that OpenAI had scraped a large amount of web content, including copyrighted work from authors, to train their AI models. This raised concerns about intellectual property rights and fair compensation in the age of AI.
The Authors Guild, a major advocacy group for writers' rights, has sued OpenAI over this issue. However, their stance is not a blanket rejection of AI technology. Chief executive, Mary Rasenberger, says, “We have to be proactive because generative AI is here to stay … Our position is that there’s nothing wrong with the tech, but it has to be legal and licensed” (emphasis mine).1
explains that generative AI does not simply regurgitate memorized chunks of training data, but rather learns patterns and generates new content. He argues that this transformative use may not violate copyright in the same way that verbatim copying would.History has seen this pattern over and over:
New technology is released.
People panic.
Regulations are put in place.
People start calming down.
People accept it as part of life.
Writers no longer question why we use laptops instead of, or in addition to, typewriters or pen and paper. It’s simply a personal choice.
Photographers have been utilising photoshop for quite some time now, from colour adjustment and lighting, to more obvious manipulation such as changing the shape of faces, adding in fantastical elements. Most laymen wouldn’t question such images; they praise the vision and creativity of the artist.