- Am I the only one who resents the new Microsoft 365 interface?
I write on my phone and my monthly subscription to 365 includes free updates which means they appear unannounced and unwanted like calls from telemarketers. As for these upgrades, do they provide me with any features I want or do they simply justify increasing my monthly charge? Well, according to Microsoft, I now have access to Co-Pilot, their generative AI service. Not that I had a choice because, quite honestly, I was happy without it. I don’t want AI telling me how to rewrite my sentences (predictive text is annoying enough) and I certainly don’t want it writing for me. But I know lots of people who do. Business and technical writers, copy writers and even would be writers who think they have a best-seller idea but don’t know the craft of writing. Should we disparage these writers or see AI as giving people who have a story to tell a platform on which to tell it?
The biggest concern seems to come from writers who fear that AI will take away their job, but what job is that? Excluding non-fiction and research papers, what is the job of writing. Basically, it's to tell a story in an entertaining and hopefully meaningful way. In order to do that writers not only need to come up with a good story, interesting and relateble characters but a way of telling the story so that the reader will hang around for 300+ pages.
Therefore, part of storytelling is craft; how to structure the tale, how to organise thoughts and how to find the most effective ways to make the reader feel that they are part of the story. I would also like to add that the best books require more than craft. They provide the reader with insights. This ability to give the reader something more, whether it's some new insight or some confirmation that they are not the only one to feel or believe something, that something goes beyond the craft of telling a story. It's what makes art, well, art.
I think any discussion of AI involves a discussion of how craft and art interact.
At the turn of the 19th century, mass production replaced bespoke hand-crafted goods. This resulted not only in craft people losing their jobs but the knowledge of how to do these crafts was also lost. On the other hand, it allowed middle class people to fill their homes with beautiful items they could not have afforded otherwise and art still flourished. The development of the camera allowed ordinary people to capture images of their families and favorite landscapes and still aficionados shelled out good money for paintings. It encouraged painters to do more than create an image and even when painters recreated photographically perfect images, we called this ability to see something beyond the image, art. Conversely, painters who recreate masterpieces that can fool even the best art valuers are dismissed as fraudsters. Not because their work isn't good. It's because they try to pass it off as an original when it isn't. Even creating a painting in the style of Pucasso's blue period, for instance, might show great craftsmenship but I doubt it would be considered art. On the other hand taping a banana to a canvas might be sell as art when it doesn't show either craftsmanship or originality. Well, we might ask, who is the bigger fraudster, the talented forger or the untalented exhibitionist?
Which segues nicely into a discussion of the craft of writing and whether a well-written novel produced by AI should be considered a fraud or not. The current discussions seem to center around the marketplace, particularly, Amazon, being flooded with crappy AI written novels but I think the real fear is that AI may replace even well written novels. Certainly universities are concerned that students are using AI to produce high quality research papers. So how real is this fear?
If you're of a certain age, you will remember that calculators were once banned in schools. Now that seems ludicrous especially when calculators are now on the list of school supplies. Am I suggesting that educators embrace AI as an effective research tool. I think we would be crazy not to but there is a caveat. Not all AI tools are as effective as others because their data sources are not properly vetted. Therefore, if we are going to take advantage of AI, we need to ensure that it is using the best available data.
Before delving into craft, Art and AI, perhaps I should first state that I am actually a fan of technology. In the 70s, I couldn't get a decent paying job as a writer but I did get an entry level job in computers. It was one of the few jobs where women at that time, could have a career instead of a modest income to tide them over till they got married.
Even so, when I started as a coder in the mid 70s, I was getting paid half what the men around me were earning. I knuckled down and I learned to be assertive and within a year my pay gap narrowed to a more acceptable 25%. But my years in IT taught me more than how to get ahead in a man's world. I observed how computers were not only taking over accounting offices, laboratories and factories where routine jobs could be done faster by machines but they were moving into animation and printing. These were jobs that employed skilled, artistic creative people. People who'd spent years learning their craft were being replaced by a new suite of tech savy crafters. Even designing computer applications moved from the realm of a small group of nerds in computer rooms to that of the masses. This was partly because computers themselves became cheaper but also because there were tools that made creating applications faster and easier.
And technological advancements are not new to writers or publishers.
In the late 1800s a new device changed hpw writers and publishers worker almost as much as computers. The word typewriter originally referred to the person who used these novel gadgets but by WW1, journalists were writing in the field using 3-row portable typewriters. I admit, I love those old movies where the writer rips the paper out of the typewriter’s carriage and tosses it angrily in the waste paper basket or types The End and pulls out that final copy. If only! But I don’t think any of us are willing to give up our word processors for those romantic notions of typewriters and manuscripts written long-hand, nor will publishers allow us to.
But that’s not the only additional hurdle publishers are putting back onto writers. To get your manuscript read, if you are not already known, it is highly recommended that you employ an editor to make sure your story is worthy of publishing. You definitely must ensure that it is proof-read and then on top of that, writers are expected to establish a social media presence. They need a web site, Facebook, Instagram and X accounts, and its helpful to have videos showing how marketable you are as a person. In other words, more and more large publishing houses are reducing their risks in order to increase their profits. Is it any wonder, then, that more and more writers are considering alternatives to traditional publishing.
One alternative is to self-publish. Aside from the stigma of self-publishing (meaning you're not good enough for a traditional publisher), there's the extra work required to take a finished manuscriot and get it published. You’ll need to format your book according to your printer’s specifications and you would be crazy not to create ebook formats for Amazon, Kobo, Google and Apple. You'll need a cover for your book and blurbs for front and back. You'll need to know about ISBNs, copyrights, lodging your book with national libraries, and distribution. And then there's the marketing. Suddenly, our image of the writer as a sensitive soul, sitting in front of a computer is shattered. Writing it seems requires more than learning the craft of writing.
So why wouldn’t writers, like other professionals, take advantage of software tools that helps them to be more productive?
We're all familiar with tools, like Grammerly, that review our words and highlight spelling errors but you can also ask them to suggest changes to what you've written. Is this an unfair use of AI or is it like going to a friend and asking them the same question. In the end, you, as the writer decide what words to keep and which to toss away.
Which brings me to the topic of using AI in the creation of Art.
Recently I trialed a piece of AI software that is being marketed to publishers as well as authors. You feed your manuscript into the software and it gives back a number of analytics along with a score. That score is the predicted star rating for the novel. I fed one of my novels into it and I must admit the analytics, including the star rating, accurately matched reviews from 4 reputable reviewers. So will publishers use AI to work through their slush pile faster? Can writers use AI tools to replace or reduce the role of editors on works in progress? A more intriguing question is whether publishing firms will replace staff by using these tools.
The more I thought about automation in general and AI in particular, the more I was reminded of a couple of books. The first is Working by Studs Terkle. I read that book in the 70s and it still stays with me nearly 50 years later. Studs was a radio host and his book is a series of interviews with people about their jobs; what they did and how they felt about their work. It highlights how jobs, what we do, how we do them, are important to humans. The second book, The End Of Work, written by Jeremy Rifkin describes how automation is set to replace jobs in every sector. It's a bleak future unless you, the human you, learns how and when to let automation take charge. It can allow us to be more productive and creative or it can destroy our ability to think and reason for ourselves.
With these two books in mind, I decided that in order to look at AI, where its going, what we need to embrace and what we need to be wary of, I needed to actually use these tools. So consider this to be the beginning of a journey which I'll be sharing, into the world of writing with my new companion, AI.
In the meantime, let me know your thoughts, your experience and your concerns about AI.