Artificial; December 19 2022

I am superbly lucky to love my family.

This past weekend involved a visit to my brother, and it throws into awareness how sour my life could have gone if I didn’t have a family who loves me, supports me, accepts me for everything I am.

This has nothing to do with this week’s blog topic, really, I just… Wow. It’s worth keeping in my mind.

On a more dour note, I want to talk about AI art. Specifically the writing portion, even though I have strong feelings about the visual art aspect of AI art as well.

I’ve seen samples of AI writing. To a practiced reader – which I like to think I am – it comes across as bland, token. There was nothing particularly inventive about the pieces I read. It was the kind of thing I would have whipped up as a backstory for a one-off Dungeons and Dragons character off the top of my head.

But it’s worse than being boring. It’s the exact cookie cutter content that I fear will override marginalized voices completely.

Publishing, I’ve found, loves to churn out ‘new but not too new’ concepts to readers, preying on our need for familiarity. We want to be surprised, but not at the expense of learning something new. That may, gasp, make us uncomfortable while we adjust to this new world – and I’m not talking exclusively about the fantasy genre.

Queer content. Multicultural content. Disabilities and neurodivergences. Where do they fit in AI writing? Given that AI has to fit a certain mold (a very white, cis, heterosexual mold) in order to be read as ‘believable’, how long will it be before publishing phases out all voices that are ‘other’?

As for me, on a personal level… I’m very disheartened by AI art. I can’t seem to write anything that doesn’t dip its toes into that pool of diversity. If it never sells, I can kiss my only chance of giving my kid a better life goodbye. As a disabled person, I’m not capable of working for a living any other way; writing fiction isn’t just who I am and what I do, it’s the only thing capitalism deems worthy about me.

One good book advance – not even a great one! An okay one! – would utterly transform our lives. It’s looking further and further out of reach, and AI content sets up increasingly taller hurdles on that path.

Here’s some of our 100% human produced story, anyway:

Inanna spent more time on the map than Sage would have expected, a level of detail going into the sketches they were surprised to find they might need. They almost worried about how much time they were cutting from Inanna’s work day, but in contrast, she appeared totally unconcerned.

“My father was a cartographer,” she said, apropos of nothing. Perhaps she could hear the gears in Sage’s head turning. “I learned a thing or two from him. Not much of an artist, not the way he was, but… This should get you safely to the city. From there, maybe you’ll find work, blend in. So long as they never know you were supposed to be the sacrifice…”