Chantelle Atkins
Continuing our exploration of what generative AI in creative writing means to authors, this week we have author Chantelle Atkins giving her views on the topic.
1.Do you currently use any form of AI to enhance or improve your books and if so how do you feel it makes your writing better?
I don’t use anything except for spell and grammar check on Word, if that counts. I now have AI ‘help’ installed without my permission on Word and on Outlook email and I find it incredibly irritating.
2. How do you feel about AI in the creative industries in general, eg art, writing, music, are you in support or are you against? Tell us why.
While I can understand and see the benefits it may have for some creatives in some industries, my overall view is that I do not support it. For example, I can understand struggling authors opting for AI to create book covers and audio books, but it makes me sad that this is taking work away from voice actors and artists. I think AI art itself, and AI used to ‘improve’ creative writing is wrong, and a form of cheating. It’s taking a short cut, in my view. It’s selling yourself short. I worry that in the future people will rely so much on AI to communicate and be creative that we will start to lose our own imagination, one of the things that makes us human! I am also against it as it is incredibly bad for the environment due to the amount of energy and water it needs, and I also find the scraping of author’s works without their permission and with no compensation, in order to train AI repugnant and morally wrong.
3. How often are you coming across AI content on the internet now and are you usually able to spot it?
More and more, and I can spot it because the content all has a similar tone and voice to it, a similar style, if you like. What I have always embraced and loved about writing is how no two authors would write the same story in the same way. We all have a very unique voice and way of storytelling, whether we realise it or not and content written by Ai does not. I find it very robotic and often quite cringy.
4. Do you know of any creatives who have already lost their job or seen their earnings decline thanks to AI?
Not personally, but it is early days. I have certainly heard of artists, designers and copy writers in particular losing work and I think this will only get worse.
5. Copy writers and translators are just two professions that have seen their earnings decline as companies switch to using AI. Who do you think will be next and is there anything we can do to stop it?
I fear that essay and article writers will be next, freelance creatives who submit regularly to magazines and newspapers, for example. If the company hiring them finds it is cheaper to feed information into AI and have it write a quick story for them, I can see them taking advantage of this. I think copy writing in general is where we will see AI creep in more and more. Book cover designers will lose work and voice actors.
6. What are your gut feelings about AI in creative writing? Are you curious and excited by the possibilities, or do you think it spells the death knell for creativity and imagination?
My feeling is that we have got this far without it, we’ve had Shakespeare, the Brontes, Stephen King, I could go on – they didn’t need AI to inspire or shape their words and stories, so why do we need it now? Our imagination, our ability to construct stories, deconstruct them and rewrite them, edit them, revise them and share them, is what makes us human. I also think that writing should be hard. It’s incredibly important and shouldn’t be something we just hand over to AI. We should struggle through drafts and rewrites, we should work at our craft to get better and better. If we ask AI to do it for us, can we really say the work is ours? Can we really take the credit? Can we really be truly proud of the result? As for AI shaping emails and now even Whatsapp messages, I fear where this will lead us. We already live in a world where we are dangerously disconnected from each other. From self-service checkouts to automated responses when we phone companies, it is getting harder and harder to deal with humans. If we don’t feel connected to each other, will we care about each other at all? Imagine getting AI to write your Whatsapp messages to your loved ones… That terrifies me.
7. Would you personally read AI content if you knew it was AI or do you aim to only read books written by humans without the aid of AI?
I would never ever knowingly read AI content. The trouble is I think it will get harder and harder to spot it. I aim to only ever read work written by actual humans.
8. Where do you think AI will be in another 5, 10 years time?
This is what worries me the most. It is so fast moving and at the moment the law has not even caught up with it and had no idea how to deal with the AI models stealing author’s work to train it. It will just get faster I think, and I predict we will be living in a very different world in 10 years time, one where people speak to and communicate more with AI than they do with each other.
9. Do you think AI in creative writing will ultimately be a bad or a good thing for writers?
Bad. Very bad. I honestly struggle to see its benefits! Especially when it comes to crafting essays, articles, poems and stories. If you can’t do it yourself, should you even be attempting to? I just can’t not see it as cheating. I think people will lose imagination and confidence in their own abilities as they hand more and more tasks over to AI.
10. Use this last question to voice any concerns about AI specifically in creative writing
I worry most about young writers. I work with children who have grown up with smartphones, the internet, social media and now AI. Some of them use AI to help them spell, and some already use AI to improve their work. I would rather they studied the craft of writing and figured it out for themselves. I worry that we will lose a generation of writers as it becomes easier and easier, second nature even, for them to run everything they write through AI in order to improve it.
Chasing Driftwood Books 