Being a creator and using AI
AI is something that I'm becoming more conflicted over. It is an incredibly disruptive technology because it is so useful and there are so many possible applications for it. I use AI to help me at work and in personal projects. At the same time, I'm writing a novel, which is something that people are actively using AI to do.
There are many excellent artists that pour themselves into creating incredible paintings, drawings, and more. I love their work and have several examples hanging in my house. And yet, I've used AI to generate images to use on this blog.
I've talked to folks who feel AI is morally wrong, and while I don't have the same intensity of a reaction to it, I agree with many of their concerns. They are legitimate. AI has been trained on people's creations without their permission. Their work was online in some form and AI slurped it up. People have lost their jobs due to AI increasing productivity enough to result in layoffs or AI has just taken over the work they used to do. I'm acutely aware that career in technology will be impacted by it. There's no if for me.
There are so many possible applications for AI that the world is going to go there. I think people have as much chance at stopping AI adoption as they do stopping the tide. I can't change that. I can make changes in my skills to adapt to its impact, but that's about it. I can also choose how and where I use AI.
How I use AI in writing
I've used AI in the Mack Hawthorne Project. There, I said it. However, I that has been limited to brainstorming names. "Hey ChatGPT, give some ideas for character names based on X, Y, and Z." Then I went through the results and created names that sounded interesting to me. For some reason, coming up with names for things is really difficult for me. So yes, I use AI to brainstorm things in my writing. I've liked the results far more than random name generators.
However, I don't use it to write anything. Partly because AI written stuff sounds soulless. It has no voice. I think that's an output of absorbing everyone's writing, and running that through a bunch of math to come up with words. It's not interesting. Attempts at giving it a different voice feel like stereotypes. At least for now. We'll see if that changes over time.
The biggest reason that I write on my own is that writing is part of my journey in a new craft. Sure I could be faster, but I wouldn't learn my voice. I wouldn't develop my skills in telling a story. I wouldn't grow. That just sounds sad. So no thank you, I'll struggle through this experience without something spitting pages of words out at me.
AI and image generation
I've already said that I've used AI to generate images for this site. I actually liked the images that Midjourney created for Every journey starts somewhere and The fight to get started. The others are okayish. At the same time it felt kind of icky to me. I can use stock photos and images, but I've rarely found them to be very interesting. So I'm kind of stuck looking for a solution here. When I need an image for a post, I need it on demand. I'd also like it to follow along with the message or an emotion that matches the blog post. That's a tall order for picking things from stock image sites. 😫
Because I'm feeling unhappy with being a creator and using AI to generate images, I doubt you'll see any more posts with them. Remember, I can choose how I use AI and I don't think I'll choose to do this.
My problem still remains for the blog, but I'll see what I can come up with there.
Mack Hawthorne Project progress
I skipped school work for most of the evening and wrote on the book. I'm aiming for about 100,000 words in this book, so this puts me a little over 2% done. I hope to get some more time to write this weekend when I'm not slipping writing time in between work, dinner, and bed.
On that note, I'm going to try to make a little more progress on my capstone paper before bed. It will be so nice when this is done.