AI and the fourth party cheated... The creative experience you didn't have

I don't intent this to be a screed against technology, but in all the talk about artificial intelligence and these newer re-generative large language models, much of the focus has gone to:

First party damage: 

This is the impact on creatives (that's us) when these AI models are trained on our work without compensation. 

Second party damage:

There's also been discussion about the need for transparency with consumers, so, for instance, they're not "fooled" by a digital audiobook narration when they thought they were getting a human performance.

Third party damage:

Translators and illustrators and writers not getting the gig because the publishers are just using AI programs to re-generate "good enough" work instead.

There's a fourth to consider.

Today in my online journey I was presented with an ad for an AI company's product that "can write up to 20 books per month" with the tagline: "Your book idea, finally written."

It took me twenty years from the time I started seriously writing KidLit and wanting to be published to having my first YA novel traditionally published this month. I wasn't working on that novel for the entire time, but I've put in a LOT of hard work on my craft, over many years. 

Having an idea is not the creative work. It's crafting a story to deliver that idea, and that's how we develop the unique voice we each learn to use when creating our art. (When editors talk about looking for "voice" this is what they mean. How is your version of idea A different from everyone else's version of idea A?) 

And it feels like this company is encouraging folks to cheat the process -- to not do the hard work, to not learn how to write over many many drafts, and just have a computer model do it for them. So easy! Write twenty books a month! I can't even begin to imagine how terrible those twenty books would be. And in a marketplace that's already so crowded, it just makes it that much harder for consumers to find the good stuff -- the stuff we've been working so hard to craft so well.

I shared my admittedly salty take on the ad with some friends, and one of them brought up how amazing the creative process is -- how yes, it can be hard, but it's also incredibly rewarding: to conceptualize something and then put in the creative time to craft it into the piece of art you want it to be. And that someone looking to have a computer model do the writing for them was cheating themselves out of a creative life.

And I think that's right. And we should maybe consider that Fourth party damage. 

I'm very grateful I get to live a creative life, and create books for kids and teens. I hope you get to enjoy that creative life, too. It's pretty wonderful.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee