Why I’ve embraced GenAI

You’ll notice I use a lot of Generative AI imagery.

Some of you might have an issue with that.

People are very concerned about GenAI. I’ve seen writers and artists I respect and admire pen vitriolic screeds admonishing the coming GenAI scourge, warning of the immoral black box poised to steal our humanity away one surreal Mario image at a time.

I get it, but I don’t agree.

They think it’s theft, or lazy, or job-killing (I’ll post again soon with my rebuttals on these common arguments), but I believe most people see AI as a threat because they believe it's coming to replace them.

LLMs don’t replace people. They can’t do anything without human input. They don’t think. They don’t create.

They’re mirrors.

They take some form of human expression—whether written or visual or music or code or whatever—indexes how the constituent parts are interrelated, and then generates a recontextualized version of those millions of interrelated parts, based on user input. Or they translate one kind of expression into another.

They’re advanced relationship engines. They only know what they see, and what they see is us.

GenAI can do amazing things. Things I wouldn’t have been able to do even a year ago without a dedicated studio team working for me. I’m truly excited about where it’s heading.

That being said, I’d never use AI to write. My words are my words, that's what I'm selling, and that’s what I hope people are expecting when they buy one of my books. But I have no problem using AI for marketing materials.

AI is technology. It is a tool, just like any other tool, from the printing press to the telephone to the transistor to the internet to the smartphone. Generative AI is part of a toolset that could potentially ramp us into a new technological golden age. Or send killer robots back in time to kill us.

I imagine, as with most other technologies, the science fiction of it all will fade as we deal with the realities of what it can do, and we’ll forget what all the initial fuss was about.