The venue reeks of cheap coffee. Creaks and groans of tables and chairs dragging on the hardwood floor echo, bouncing off the high ceiling. Barely audible beneath it all is the mumbling of socially awkward writers mingling in the early morning.
The chipped folding tables are covered with cloths. Stacks of books and displays are propped up, tip over, then propped up again. Chatter and laughter rise in volume proportional to the increasing number of bodies.
A quiet little man with a single stack of books stands next to his wife, who looks at no one and speaks to no one. He shows me his book. Shows me photos of himself with his book. Tells me how impressed people are with his work. And so on.
This guy, my neighbor for the day, nods toward my carefully laid-out display of books. My short story trilogy, finally complete.
“How long did these take you to write?”
The way he asks this, it feels like a trick question. Like he’s competing with me in a contest nobody told me about.
“All my life,” I say.
His face twists in confusion. In effort to clarify, I joke about how we spend a lifetime spelunking the depths of our own lived experiences and those of other storytellers.
Silence.
“You know how it is,” I shrug. “It’s a lifetime of accumulating experiences and reading as much as possible.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t read.”
A writer who doesn’t read. It’s as absurd as a plumber who doesn’t like to get wet, or a guitar player who doesn’t listen to music. It’s absurd, but not uncommon. Writing takes work, requires ongoing learning, and countless hours spent alone crafting sentences.
Unless you’re like this dude. Then you can skip the reading and love for the written word. All you need is an internet connection and bloated sense of entitlement.
*
In the mid-90s, I maintained a strict daily routine: sulk and daydream at my factory job making printed circuit boards, then speed along the highway for 20 minutes while yowling along to a CD (yeah, probably nu metal) then bong rips and stuffing my food hole with Cool Ranch Doritos.
With those important tasks checked off the list, I’d park myself at the kitchen table with a notebook for some quality scribble time. Story sketches. Fragments and vignettes from my day moping around the factory. Until I got the software.
Don’t ask me the name of the software because I don’t remember. Might have something to do with the haze of bong rips and Dorito dust.
I’d wait as the dial-up screech connected to American Online, and then pop the disc into the CD-ROM drive. Whoosh! On my way to be a writer.
It was so easy. That’s what the text on the box promised me. That’s why I spent my hard-earned factory pennies on it at Best Buy. This software would help me write that book. All I had to do was enter all my characters, place settings, and other details and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo! The story trapped inside me would be released, becoming readable material at last.
I entered the character names. Their descriptions, their yadda, yadda, yadda. It was fun. The software nudged me along and encouraged me, and before long, I recognized that I was being nudged into a typical hero’s journey. Exactly what I didn’t want to write. My initial excitement waned as I found myself like Jeff Fahey in The Lawnmower Man, trapped within the confines of the program that was supposed to unleash my full potential. It didn’t allow for experimentation, rule breaking, or originality. I couldn’t get weird with it.
The software, whatever the hell it was called, wasn’t to blame. I’m sure it worked great for someone writing something with more of a Skywalker-esque character arc. The blame was on me for trying to take a shortcut.
I had to do the fucking work. So, I kept reading books. I paid close attention to anything written: songs, standup comedy, film, and TV. And I wrote. I took a class here and there. I read and wrote some more. I joined a critique group and critiqued the work of my fellow writers. (I’d argue that this is more important than having your own work critiqued for lengthy reasons I won’t get into here.)
I read a lot of bad books. I produced a lot of bad writing. That software provided me not with a finished story, but a lesson: that shiny newfangled technology can’t do the work for you. Not the real work. Not original work that represents your humanity as an artist. Not work that matters.
It can regurgitate some derivative bullshit, so I guess it all depends on what your goal is.
Advertisements and snake oil salesmen are effective because they promise shortcuts to people. Most people want more results with less work. They want better health without changing their diets or doing more cardio. If it can be done by taking a pill that has even a slight chance of working, that’d be better.
If strapping some electronic device to their belly can give them abs while they watch Netflix, that’s a better option than taking a break in the binge watch to go for a walk.
Every day, I skip YouTube ads where some creepy shit goblin is promising me yet another way to make thousands of dollars in passive income while I sleep. Free money with no work! Fuck yeah!
Hey, I get it. I work out every day. I don’t always enjoy it. Because I’m fucking lazy. I force myself while fighting off ways to bullshit myself and justify taking a “rest day.” Or maybe my finger hovers over the “skip ad” button a bit longer because, hey, maybe this shit goblin is different.
But, nah. There are no shortcuts. There’s only working toward whatever your goal is, finding a new one that’s more attainable, or giving up on making goals because goals are hard.
And writing is hard. People think it’s easy. Great writers make it look easy. But it isn’t. It’s a lot of work to fill blank pages. To rewrite them once, twice, twenty times. It’s work to spend a lifetime constantly trying to improve.
Art is work. Creating is work.
It’s a person’s time and labor. Countless hours of cognitive and emotional toil.
One of the problems with the internet is that people often feel entitled to whatever they find there. They come across something that speaks to them, and that’s awesome. That’s the point. We create not just for ourselves, but to reach out to strangers across the chasm. When people share what they find in the infinite galaxies of online space, it’s even better. I’ve received occasional tags and alerts when another creator has used a line from one of my books, incorporating the words into their own art, making something new. I LOVE seeing these. At that point, the words are no longer mine alone, but something shared. A connection between people. They feel like a magic bean I tossed that was picked up by someone who saw a potential there that I didn’t, then used my beans to make a rad beanstalk that they then used to fetch the golden art goose.
But then there’s taking someone’s words and art, cropping their name off or not bothering with attribution like anyone has the right to claim another person’s creation as their own. IG is full of stolen jokes posted by wannabe comedians. Back in the early days of social media, I occasionally had entire blog posts stolen. Some asshat copied and pasted them on their own site as if they’d written them. Too lazy to write their own content, it was easier to steal it. I wasn’t alone on this. It happened to many people. Having your work stolen sucks.
These dudes posted a quote from my book, Broken Abroad. I doubt they read it. They likely yanked it from Goodreads, or some quote site then decided it was theirs and cut my name off. People do this shit all the time. Gotta get those likes.
The attention economy has fuck all to do with ethics.
ChatGpt is theft, too. Plain and simple.
*
My husband is washing dishes. I’m standing next to him, drying and stacking. Ranting and monologuing about the generative AI seeping through the cracks of my art and writing communities. Critique groups that are being swarmed with the unwanted pests of AI-written submissions, or that are totally fine with the human-written stories dwindling away to make a space for ChatGPT’s plagiarized drek.
“I’ve been writing some of this down,” I say as I angrily dry a coffee mug. “The only problem is, I’m so fucking fired up about this shit that I’ve been struggling to squeeze my rage-filled rantings into a coherent narrative.”
He sets a plate in the dish drainer and switches off the tap. He glances at me over his shoulder, smirking. “I wonder if ChatGPT could help you with that.”
Yeah, maybe my husband, Mr. Funny Man, is right. But that struggle, that’s where the gold is mined. Forming the idea. Chipping away at the marble to find the shape hidden inside. A text generator can’t write a story about the time eight-year-old me pushed my friend Hazel down onto the rough gravel of the playground; the memory of the monster I saw reflected at me in her tear-filled eyes. No artificial “intelligence” can assist me in writing a story that honestly expresses the calm terror that washed over me when I looked up from the floor at the blood-spattered walls of my house as I watched my boyfriend standing above me screaming, arms flailing, gripping a kitchen knife in each hand. ChatGPT can’t put into words the turmoil of returning to my hometown after my friend had his guts blown out on Easter morning. It doesn’t understand the barrage of grief that bombarded me at every turn, transforming the town to a gloomy, unwelcoming place.
Sure, it can spit out some words that it stole from various places without any attribution, but it can’t understand you, your experiences, and your writing voice. It knows nothing of regret, fear, longing, or grief. Because it doesn’t fucking know or feel anything.
And don’t discount the value of things going tits up when it comes to making a good story. Think of the shitshow that was the filming of Apocalypse Now. Think of the malfunctioning mechanical shark in Jaws. Imagine what those stories would be if everything had gone according to plan.
Besides all that, using ChatGPT when so many writers are striking and struggling to get paid a fair wage (or any wage at all) feels scabby to me. How much solidarity are you showing for fellow scribes who are fighting against losing their jobs to this shit?
My cynical half says it’s a losing battle. Too many people are on board with ChatGPT, seeing it as passive income or an easy path to call oneself a writer. Or most hilarious of all, as a get-rich-quick-scheme. Yeah, because we’re all fucking rich. Many writers see it as an easy way to write more, write better, and… I don’t know what. Students like it. Fuck, even lawyers are jumping on board.
Whatever. It doesn’t make you a writer. It makes you a hack. Even still, I have no doubt that sooner than later, my schmuck ass will be setting up my display at another book event with bad coffee. The person with the table next to me will stare dumbfounded when I tell him how long it took me to write my latest book, and then he’ll smile and say, “I don’t write.”
