#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 12 Nbr 15 FEV— Have you used any form of AI to help in creating your work? Do you have a red line? Where is it? Full Essay Version

I've been around long enough that I remember when the #Altair 8080 (the first commercial personal computer) got a full page ad in Scientific American. My BFF and I talked about it after school (11th grade, I think?) for hours. I had my own slimline phone on my own extension. I was a privileged kid. The #computer club had a teletype connection to a computer that ran #BASIC. We also had access to an #IBM mainframe assembler using #MIS (pencil in) punch cards. A friend built an #IMSAI 8080 with 256 bytes of memory and it played songs we could listen to by tuning to part of the FM band influenced by the frequency of bits passing through the memory buss.

Why do I bring this up? The first things we programmed (after ping-pong on the toggle switch lights, Star Trek, and later adventure games) where types of artificial intelligence. We've been "teaching" computers to "think" for us since we could rip them away from the greedy money grubbers who wanted to do things like accounting and payroll. Current concepts of AI rely on pattern matching against databases, in very simplified terms. Early #AI were procedural, and if it solved your math problem, spelled your word correctly, or found data in the noise, it was intelligent. It is inescapable that unless we write longhand or type on a typewriter, that we have used what someone terms AI.

Anybody remember Clippy?

The key to this question, and how I am going to take it, is to focus on the word "creating." To me, that highlights generating something. Text. Graphics. Though this implies #genAI (the current thing, something like #Diffusion or #ChatGPT). It also means graphic tools that I use to remove and add image elements to photos, or otherwise intelligently improve them in ways I could imagine but was previously incapable due to lack of talent, practice, or understanding of the unenhanced tools.

As for text, I remember once writing a chatbot psychologist. IF-THEN-ELSE. In BASIC, back in high school or it may have been in an equivalent language on a DEC-10 at university. It did not pass the Turing Test, but it could lift one's mood, which could help with me "creating" work!

I've no interest in using something like chatGPT to build a story from prompts. It would be the program's story, not mine. It would be a Cliff Notes version of an unwritten story, summarized, never provided a soul, before even being written. Because these things work by pattern matching and predicting what would be the next word (based on an average of everybody's writing or specific genres or authors), it would be pure statistical fabrication—not even fabulation, which implies creative fantasy. It would be a story with none of the emotion, feeling, or meaning I'd put into it. It would be phantom chatter masquerading as wit through statistical randomness. No enlightenment possible, except by accident.

As an author, why would I even try to replace myself, or create the tools for others to try to do the same? I suspect people that do, do so as I wrote above because they are "incapable due to lack of talent, practice, or understanding of the tools." I'll add, also laziness, though I tar myself with the same brush as I wrote above.

Never discount greed. Authors cost money. Computers cost once.

In any case, the AI tools built into the software I do use barely save me time as it is. I can't start a dictation with the 1st person personal pronoun on any of my systems. Statistically, more people start dictation with "Hi" then "I," so I always have to correct that. Thanks to auto-incorrect, even the words I spell correctly (few enough as it is) get changed. In this very article, the tool insisted I had a "teletype connection to a commuter!" Not only do I have to be aware of my own tendency toward grammar issues and typos, I have to proof for AI typos, including chaining typos since the tools keep track of some meaning and can spawn a hellacious brew of misconception and embarrassment should it slip out to readers. I know what I mean to write. Sometimes I find myself overruled by my own tools.

Have I used AI? Not genAI. Procedural tools, yes. Not for willingly generating text.

Red line? Yes. No generating story or text. What's the point?

[Author retains copyright (c)2024 R.S.]

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