My Stance on AI (And Why I Don't Use it in my Writing)

So y’all have heard about AI, right? It’s been a bit of a big deal lately. Pops up in the news now and then, is a mysteriously bubble-shaped foundation supporting a massive chunk of the world’s economy. Yeah, you’ve probably heard of it. As an author and someone who spends his 40+ hours a week as a writing educator and communicator, AI is something I see a lot of. Not just the shoved-in-your-face Co-Pilot in Microsoft products or the slop that’s clogging up platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and LinkedIn, but the more technical side of it, too.

Of course, being in the writing world, I also see all the news articles of the latest author—indie or traditional—caught leaving prompts in their published works or blaming their editor for AI-isms (those tell-tale signs of AI usage) in their writing.

AI is a controversial topic and extremely polarizing (because what isn’t anymore?), so I figured I’d use an article on this new blog to outline my thoughts on it, both personally and professionally. I mean, you can probably tell where I stand based on the title of the article, but let me elaborate.

God, I’m so sick of AI.

That’s it. See you in the next one.

Now, for those still here, let me break my ideas down a bit so you get where I’m coming from, but not before a big ol’ preface: This is a values discussion. Everything you’re about to read, while reinforced with facts and studies, is based on my personal values.

There are some values I think should be shared and, if you don’t hold them, you’re a bad person. Are you a hateful bigot who wishes harm on someone because they’re different? That’s bad and you’re bad. Do you exploit people to earn a few more bucks or simply feel superior? Also bad and you’re still bad.

If you disagree with me about AI, I don’t think you’re a bad person, especially considering the unprecedented money and efforts driving its integration into everything you touch. I just can’t reconcile the harm caused by AI with my day to day. Let’s put it in perspective: I’m currently writing this part of this blog on my phone while waiting for my haircut. My phone contains pieces that have caused harm through their creation. Harm to people and their families, harm to the environment, and harm to society (that’s a topic for another article).

If I could, I’d love to go through life without my phone. Unfortunately, I can’t. The same can be said for my computer, for agriculture, for cars and planes and single-use plastics.

That said, I do feel a sense of responsibility to mitigate some of that harm—use my current phone for as long as possible before I replace it, reduce my consumption of red meat, etc. But I will never fault anyone, myself included, for doing what they can or what they must in a broken system.

We know AI causes harm—and, for the sake of this discussion, I’m specifically referring to large language models (LLMs) when I say AI. The following is just a shortlist of the negative impact it has had with plenty of empirical support:

• High energy consumption and growing environmental footprint
• Significant water consumption by AI data centers
• Hallucinations and factual inaccuracies
• AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes
• Biases inherited from training data
• Copyright and intellectual property disputes
• Facilitation of phishing, scams, and fraud
• Privacy risks from sensitive user inputs
• Labor displacement in certain occupations
• Emotional attachment to AI and increased disregulation from those attachments
• Automation bias (people trusting AI too readily)

Then there’s all the harm we’re still actively studying where the evidence isn’t looking great:

• How AI reduces long-term critical thinking
• Effects on creativity when AI becomes a primary collaborator
• Long-term cognitive dependence
• The impact of AI companionship on loneliness overall
• The full economic impact on wages and employment
• Long-term societal effects of widespread synthetic media

And the thing with all this harm is that it has either happened already (and thus is irrevocable) or there’s no incentive to undo it because it financially benefits the very companies pushing these LLMs in the first place.

Call it privilege, luck, or stubbornness, but I am in a place in life where I don’t need to use AI at all. I don’t need to embrace any of its harm to do what I do.

Would using AI make things easier? Sure. Faster? Absolutely. But the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for me. Then we get to the use of AI in writing. Now we go beyond my personal values to the value of the tool itself. And, likewise, I don’t think wringing the robot is worth the tech juice that comes out.

Even occasional use of AI has been shown to make you worse at the task you’re doing, plus it’s one of the—if not the—biggest forms of cognitive offloading. Now, cognitive offloading isn’t bad, necessarily, when it comes to stuff you don’t want to do or improve at.

Not only do I want to improve at my writing (and feel like I do with every book I finish), but my day job is all about helping people improve their craft. So using AI for my writing would be both contrary to what I desire and more than a little hypocritical.

Finally, we can’t discuss AI without discussing how modern LLMs came to exist. Not only were they taught by the largest theft in human history (billions of books, articles, pieces of art, videos, communities, personal profiles, and every other work of personal and creative expression posted or archived on the internet), but they were done so by the largest companies on the planet.

To make matters worse, they were stolen not for the benefit of humanity and the enrichment of our lives, but to make the wealthiest, most powerful people and entities in the world wealthier and more powerful.

It would be one thing if all of humanity’s art was stolen to cure cancer—and there is artificial intelligence being used for that. That’s fine by me.

But AI built from massive theft by the most powerful people, primarily to enrich those same people, while causing all those harms we discussed above and making us worse authors? I think I’ll pass on that one.

There are a dozen topics in this post alone that could warrant their own articles, and I may be inspired one day to write some of them. For now, my next words should be fictional ones.

P.S. If you want to grab a 100% human-written book for free, click here!