I recently joined Substack, a supposedly writer-friendly site. I may be leaving it as soon as today. AI has taken over the site and flags most everything written on there as AI-generated or assisted. I put a few of my stories from WordPress on there, and it was immediately labeled AI-generated: I’ll call bullshit on that one. Many of you, like me, have read the great authors over the years and remember their writing, so yes, we might be influenced by their ability to weave a story. There are only so many words and ways you can use them, and AI has taken everything into a database that thinks it knows best. So, why write at all? Is the day of writing over for the non-educators? I say that with a bit of menace in my mouth. I took a poll a while back at Half Price Books and found that most of the writers who are selling are women, past and present educators or professors of whatever, and spit out garbage. Gone are the days of Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Welty, Stein, and others. Amor Towles may be the exception, but there aren’t many. At this point, I am pondering whether I should even bother.
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An experiment should be conducted. Put a few stories by Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc., on Substack and see if they’re labeled “AI generated”. That should be revealing. Please don’t ask “should I bother?”. Of course you must! Otherwise, they’ll have won.
How frustrating, Phil. I have many disagreements (and outright arguments) with ai over the course of a day. I don’t hesitate to call it out on errors it makes. The hilarious thing is that its reply is always a validation that I’m correct and an apology. The thing about that is that my corrections go into its data mining so that it doesn’t make the same error again. That’s potentially both a good thing and a bad thing. Whatever you do, don’t give up on writing. You know you’re clean and so do your readers. I agree with you about the greats. They’re my all-time faves.