So! How about those LLMs, Liz?

My mother was a lawyer.

This, I am realizing, has influenced my own moral compass quite a bit (although to be fair, it’s probably more who my mother was than the law itself). When Pinterest emerged, my mother took one look at the TOS and said “Absolutely stay the hell away from that.” The ease of copyright violation–even though that wasn’t the only potential use of the platform–rang all her alarm bells. Napster for pretty pictures.

Of course Pinterest has endured, and companies and artists and all sorts of people have embraced it as a way to share artwork and products. It’s secondary advertising, the way a lot of social media is. And there’s still massive copyright infringement there–just not of the sort anybody wants to prosecute, because money.

I don’t have a Pinterest account. I’m aware most Pinterest users use it for lovely things–mood boards, event planning, artistic references. In one of those inexplicable lines I draw, I don’t judge people who use Pinterest. I just never stopped taking my mom’s advice.

And you know, kids, I kinda think Pinterest is part of what’s made us absorb the massive copyright violation of LLMs. Different scale, different purpose, yeah–but we all embraced Pinterest because “oooh, pretty,” and now genAI is straight-up stealing people’s livelihoods and the courts are largely shrugging.

If you don’t defend your copyright, you will lose it, and we have. All of us.

But I’m not here to rant about the copyright bullshit. That ship has sailed. Do I hate that? Oh, I do. Ask anyone who knows me in real life. I’ve got a pretty good sense of humor, but there are a few topics that send me right to DEFCON 1. Which is a problem, because it makes productive conversation difficult, and there are actually people out there who are persuadable about these things.

I’ll confess, right here, up front: if you’re using genAI for something that is not required by your livelihood, I am going to judge you. Yes, I know there are a handful of genuinely decent applications for the stuff; if you’re using it for that, I will probably not slam the door in your face, but I’ll be keeping an eye on you. The rest of you? I have Thoughts about the environment-destroying plagiarism bot. It’s not going to be Skynet, it’s not going to cure cancer1, it’s not going to become sentient on any level. It’s not on any large scale going to make a damn thing better in this world, and on a small scale there are better solutions than something that eats both water and brains. The bubble cannot burst fast enough, and I hope the financial fallout is bad enough that a few of those dumbass CEOs get burned, even though millions of innocent people with mutual funds are going to suffer the most.

Where the hell was I going with this? Oh, yeah: LLMs and writing.

This morning I caught a post on Bluesky about a writer who was apparently wrote an article extolling the virtues of LLMs. (I did not read it.) The social media backlash has been pretty swift, but as I’ve learned in uncountable election cycles, what seems like consensus on social media is often very different than what the general public thinks. This writer is hardly the first to come out of the LLM closet–but today, probably because I’m already cranky as hell because I’m having surgery tomorrow, I’ve started thinking about why I do not, and will not, ever2 use LLMs for writing.

If I shove all judgement out of my head (yes, impossible, but I do try), it comes down to this: I cannot imagine any way, on any level, that an LLM could help me.

One thing that fascinates me about writing–and one reason I’d be a terrible, terrible teacher of it–is that each of us has a different process. Story generation is an alchemic thing, and the nature of the writer’s brain is the biggest differentiator in how the story is born and grows and is shaped.

(It’s also the reason one of the hardest skills for writers to learn is how to finish a thing, but I digress.)

I’ve been writing stories all my life, although I didn’t start writing them down until I was old enough to hold a pencil. (My dad saved a picture book I wrote when I was about 8. No, I won’t be sharing it. Yes, I think it’s adorable that he saved it.) Compositing fiction in my head has been a part of how I interact with the world for as long as I can remember. It started out as a coping mechanism3, and it still is.

For me, the alchemy usually starts with a mood, which coalesces into a scene. From there characters appear, and then events; if the scene is still interesting to me, my brain keeps spinning on it, and eventually something resembling a plot is born. At that point, it’s all refinement, which can take years.

Do I get why people want a shortcut, a way to take their amorphous thoughts and make them consumer-ready in less time than their mercurial muse does? Of course I do.

But for me, inserting an LLM into this process would break the process. It’d destroy the story. The story would no longer be contained in my head, and I would no longer have the ability to turn it into something that said what I wanted it to say.

It would be somebody else’s work. And because I have the attention span of a gnat, I’d lose interest, set it aside, and probably salt the earth it came from.

Much has been written about those very weird tech CEOs who say things like how nice it would be to be able to outsource their imaginations to a machine, along with most of the human interactions the rest of us find critical to a happy life. They seem addicted to the idea of some external entity offering them up Fulfillment McNuggets without them having to actually feel anything, or participate in society in even the most tangential way. It’s a deeply bizarre vision of existence, and they don’t even seem to recognize how creepy and pitiable they sound.

These are the same people who try to tell me how nice it will be for me when I don’t have to come up with ideas anymore, and what the fuck, guys, get therapy.

Like most writers, I am not short of ideas. Do I find, sometimes, I’ve written myself into an insurmountable corner? For sure.

But that’s the fun part.

All those unfinished stories, all those blind plot alleys, all those characters who just didn’t work in the end–without those foundations, I’d never be able to build the thing that works. It’s all part and parcel of that same thing, that seed that was born with my moody little scene. I don’t know what it’s going to grow into! Not everything I feed it is going to be visible in the end! But because I let it grow and change and shift and succeed and fail at its leisure in my head, I’m able to mold it into what I want it to be.

Even if you removed every moral, legal, and existential objection to generative AI, I would not be using it for my storytelling. I don’t avoid it because I’m some self-righteous jackass4. I avoid it because it’s the wrong tool for the job.

I do get that it’s a temptation for some writers. If you publish, or want to be published, it’s impossible to miss the push toward speed. And most writers have day jobs, which can make it hard (even for those who write faster than I do, which would be nearly all of them) to produce at the level you’d like. I do get the “it’s just massaging the ideas I’ve given it with the prompt” spin5.

But for me, with my process, with my unique, fumbling, Liz-shaped brain, I cannot imagine a single situation where it would do anything but throw me off and slow me down.

I honestly find the current moment a very strange one. I was always a big tech cheerleader. I was the early adopter. I couldn’t wait for the latest OS release, so I could upgrade my machine and play with all the new features. This has changed relatively recently, and I think that’s because tech companies are no longer solving consumer problems. At this point tech companies are focusing on ways to squeeze more money from customers, and to eliminate their human employees entirely6. I had occasion a few days back to load up some of the mobile games I used to play 10+ years ago, and damn, not only are they still awesome, I could still play them–full-featured–when we lost our internet for half an hour this morning. Tech used to be fun.

GenAI is human-hostile, and it is not solving any kind of large-scale problem. I suppose I should be glad Anthropic etc. ripped me off, because I leapt right over grief and into rage.

I might be wrong. The damn things might indeed get so entrenched into our lives that avoiding their use becomes impossible. But hey, I’ve got an old laptop, and some old word processors. I can type in fucking vi if I have to. I can even (gasp!) go back to pen and paper. And I will, before I ever put my name on words that are not 100% mine.

The main reason I have hope, actually, is because for most uses7 genAI tools are just not applicable. They don’t do most of what they’re sold to do. Pay attention to the tense when you hear these genAI evangelists talk–if it’s not something it’s demonstrably doing today, it’s at least even money they’re talking about something that’s architecturally impossible for it ever to do. And the financials behind these companies are absolutely hair-raising. Everybody’s living off loans, and the giant revenue streams are not appearing. Every time you hear some outlandish story in the press–AI will fix climate change, AI is angry with us and is going to destroy us, etc.–realize that there’s a closing window for these companies to get people to pay them enough to cover the tool’s usage, and they’re desperate for you to believe it can do far more than it does.

Most of AI hype is grift. Possibly hopeful grift–some of these Big Brains really seem to believe their own nonsense–but still. Most of the future-speak is from people well aware they’re not even close to getting there, and in fact are likely sitting on a tech dead-end.

Linguistically, of course, LLMs are fascinating, although not for the language they can produce. They’re fascinating because they expose our own mushy, fallible human brains, and how powerful language is as a tool. If something talks to us and sounds plausibly human, we seem to be wired to erroneously attribute all kinds of human characteristics to it. And of course we do–talking or not, we anthropomorphize nearly everything, from toys to computers to cars. And LLMs allow all of these objects to sound like real people. It’s a pretty neat trick, natural language generation–but the real crux of it is our human brains want so much to believe there’s a mind behind that language we’re willing to toss all common sense out the window.

For me LLMs are the antithesis of actual writing. They imitate. I might be able to phrase a prompt in a way that makes the tools generate something that’s imitative of what my imagination does. Why would I do that? What does it get me? For some audiences, it can be a neat party trick, and if they’d left it at that we’d probably all be cheerfully buying talking iDogs and moving on with our lives. Instead they’ve decided the answer is to put us all out of work, and have machines create at them so they don’t have to think, or move, or love ever again.

Yeah, I’m back to “why does anyone want this?”

I am a slow writer. I will probably always be a slow writer. Part of the joy, for me, is the percolation of the whole thing, the simmering of ideas, watching them morph and change and deepen, stirring in little bits now and then until it’s exactly what I want. I don’t need another cook in the mix. Dinner may be a ways off, kids, but I promise you: it’s 100% homemade.

Footnotes

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Passing To Freedom, Chapter 44: Plans

Chapter 44

I was moved by yet another Porter to a new Station. A laundry, where I was to work, or at least pretend to do so. I also intended to make a plan, as Anna always did.

My face was rubbed with coal, a work bonnet covering my hair. A large working dress and old cloak covered the rest of me. I was helping to stir the dirty linens, and pondering my plan, as I kept to a dark corner. I remained ready to follow one of my fellow laundresses at the slightest signal. A boy was assigned to watch the door for strangers, constables, and informers.

“You might be better off continuing your journey North alone, Miss B.”

I’d raised an eyebrow, waiting for the other shoe.

“It would be safer for all.”

I refused to leave without any word of the fate of young Tilly, and the whereabouts of Anna. I knew that the one would never stop hoping for us to find her, and the other would never rest until we did.

My plan should work. One thing I’d had plenty of time to do, trapped in that house in Virginia, was to observe. I had seen how those around me reacted, to the Senator, to his visitors, to the overseers, to myself, and to each other. Invisible, as only a piece of decoration can be, I’d watched and listened, even if I spent much of my time trying to forget most of what I’d witnessed. Now, I realized, I must draw upon that which I had tried to throw away.

I knew that Smith was a jealous man, and now I added proud, and unlettered, to the list. Those were faults which my plan must use to our advantage. He must be cut out of the picture, as a spot of mold is cut away from a piece of cheese. There must be some way to encourage, help, trick, or trap him into making a mistake that would remove him.

I hesitated at the idea of plotting a man’s death, for I was no murderess, but I had to admit that a deadly bout of over drinking, or accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom, would not go unwelcome. Removing one of the Senator’s most trusted men, and one who was a distinct danger, would serve us very well, indeed. But how to help that happen?

The animosity between Smith and Loving must be used to render both unable to move forward in the service of the Senator.

“Ouch!”

Heads lifted from their work and turned in my direction. I raised a hand to show that I was alright, bending back to my task. I must be more mindful. Keeping an eye on the boiling water, I continued stirring the laundry cauldron. I went back to mulling over how Smith’s vices could be used to our benefit.

Cutting him out would make life more difficult for the Senator, at least temporarily. That should make it easier for us to find Tilly, and then I could move further north.

Anna, would surely hear of our progress, and could join us later. But how to make some concrete use of that division between the two servants of this Pharaoh?

“Paid.”

“Sorry, what was that, Miss Berty?”

“Oh, sorry, Miss Jenny,” I had babbled, “just thinking out loud.”

“Oh, alright then, but mind your work, do remember, Dearie.”

Her voice had been kindly, but stern, and she wasn’t wrong. It was dangerous to forget to pay attention in these surroundings. As much for the spies and informers, as for the large vats of boiling laundry.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Once it was dark, and everyone had left for the day, I got word that I was wanted for a conference with two Station Masters. They wished to know more about the Senator’s operations, and Loving, in particular. I made a note to myself to remember to mention the man’s evident dislike of Smith, and to ask after Brutus’ wife, while thanking her for teaching me how to judge cheese.

I learned, at that meeting, that in addition to the other actors already known to us, there were a new variety of miscreants active in the city. Some were free men of color in the employ of bounty hunters. The Senator had raised the reward for my capture, and added to those for Tilly and Anna, directing them to be given directly into his custody, by the hand of Smith, here in Philadelphia. Both Station Masters urged me to leave the city at once, but how could I leave young Tilly, and my dear Anna? So I told them of my plan.

“They are already divided, so it may be that all we need to do is simply give them a little push, and that fighting between them can grow into a full scale conflagration.”

I saw one Station Master nod, though looking a bit doubtful. I continued.

“Smith is already spending time in the tavern, and his men are already very unhappy here. Is that not so, gentlemen?”

They had both nodded, evidently having heard at least some of the same reports that I had known must be circulating about the rantings of Smith and his men. I could see that these two Station Masters, both accustomed to shepherding their passengers from one short stay to the next, were not eager to involve themselves in what seemed to be a pointless argument among hired men, but I was sure that there was something larger at stake, here. I tried to explain it as I knew from my years of observing all three of these men.

“The Senator, as he claims, was the key mover in passing this law which so badly affects you now, here up North, is this not so?”

Both men had nodded, as I had known they must agree. Brutus had explained to me that a great many white abolitionists had been angered by the law about which the Senator had boasted so much, which I now knew to be called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1851.

Just four years ago, then, the citizens of even states as far away as New York, or in great cities like Boston, had been affected, and they were angry. So how could it be that a person, myself, who had been privy to the private dealings of the Senator, should not have some idea of how to make good use of this dispute between his men? I had seen how puffed up the Senator, and his man Smith as well, had been, while Loving, who, as the Senator’s personal secretary, ought to have been even more proud of such an accomplishment.

Loving, as the Senator’s real right hand man, must have done a great deal of the actual work involved in bringing that work to fruition. I explained how any affront to the Senator’s good standing affected his relations with the powerful men of Virginia. These, he was always concerned not to offend. At least, not openly. I further explained that if Loving were as angry with the Senator as I suspected him to be, then he was the perfect tool with which to bring down the Senator, starting with Loving’s rival, Smith.

“Which should not be too difficult, seeing as how that drunkard is already doing half the work for us, in the taverns every night.”

This comment from one Station Master reassured me. Smith and his discontented men were now in the habit of carousing rather than searching for me. That likely indicated that they had still not been paid. The taverns were merely allowing them to dispose of the credit in the Senator’s good name. If we could show, by getting Loving to make some misstep, that the first was no longer good, then the second would not take long to follow.

My plan was to get Loving to admit that the Senator was, in fact, no longer in good standing with his creditors. That would begin by bringing the two men together in a public place so that words could be had, heard, and written down. All our men needed to do was to sit in the tavern, help get Smith and his men drunk, which should be no great challenge.

We’d then find a way to lure Loving to the right street, and trip him out in front of the tavern. We would get Smith and his hooligans thrown out at just that moment, running in to Loving there.

It should be no great difficulty to either tip one of the servers or merely encourage a local youth to pull some prank that would start a brawl, and get Smith ejected from the tavern, along with his rascals.

“After all, I don’t imagine that these men are very well appreciated, even at the best of times,” I had observed.

Neither Station Master objected to this idea. They agreed to set the stage and have the audience ready. A show, indeed. On which my freedom and that of many of my fellow bondsmen depended.

***

Passing to Freedom: Willow and Weems …

a historical novel by D. Antonia Jones, aka Nia or Ni, fka Shira Destinie A. Jones