Thoughts on AI and Ethical Technology

Photo Credit: Steve Johnson @steven_j on Unsplash

I’m taking a short summer hiatus from social media as I wrap up edits. Right now I’m working on edits for Never Spar With a Viscount, and then I’ll need to jump straight into edits for Just a Little Wicked so that it’s ready to go for September 9th release, and THEN I’m moving on to Gingerbread Bones edits. Pretty much my entire summer is edits, but that’s okay because right before summer started I finished a passion project and I’m really looking forward to seeing what ends up coming of that. My editing obligations, combined with needing a little bit of breathing space from social media, has inspired my first ever hiatus. Literally the minute I deleted Instagram off my phone I felt free. FREE I tell you.

Okay, updates finished—now moving onto my thoughts on AI.

Well, let’s start with the fact that I don’t appreciate that AI was trained using my books without my consent. I don’t like that it has thieved artwork from millions of artists and then franken-squashed them together in an amalgam of stolen art. I HATE that some authors are using AI to write books, and it’s starting to make me weary of what I choose to consume on Kindle Unlimited, which is a damn shame. I don’t want to read a robot’s story. I want to read something that an author imagined in her head, that she struggled over, that she dreamed over. I want to immerse myself in a unique and yet relatable human experience, and quite frankly, I would feel cheated to discover that something I spent my precious time reading was in fact copied and spat out by AI.

There are always going to be people who chirp about “progress” and “advancements” and “inevitability,” when it comes to AI, and to that, I say hell no. AI does not have to be an inevitability. Now, I am certain there is a way to ethically use AI, a way that utilizes consent. A way that focuses on (potentially?) needed advancement and not the replacement of art and jobs. A way that is environmentally sustainable. But instead we are choosing to use AI unethically, like we’ve never seen The Matrix. Replacing real authors and illustrators with AI isn’t inevitable. Replacing real human jobs and interactions doesn’t have to happen. We are choosing it. We are actively and intimately inviting AI into our lives, and I truly think that some day we will regret replacing free thought with AI’s opinions. We’ll wish we hadn’t spent hours cheating on homework instead of earning our knowledge. We’ll regret feeding AI our children’s names and making silly AI photos of them when we could have been playing with them.

We happily divulge the details of our lives, our families, or everyday thought processes to this FREE program, and yet we don’t think that WE are the product? We don’t think this information is being collected, and will eventually be used to target us with painfully accurate marketing?

More than anything else, though, I rage against the idea of a computer cheating us out of the work we must do in order to experience a full human life. Machines that make things easier for us are incredible. Medical advancements—hallelujah! But machines that take on the ornerous tasks of thought and learning? That, my friends, is a travesty.

I am sure it goes without saying at this point, but I will never use AI in my writing or my editing or my artwork. It contradicts my principles, and even if every other author were to give up the good fight, I would be the last hold out.

That’s all for now! Xx