I wish I didn’t have to write this.

There is much that could be said about the morality and legality of so-called artificial intelligence and its dangers and alleged benefits in various disciplines and applications. This website is about written stories, particularly my own, and so I will limit myself to stating what I believe within this context.

There is no such thing as an “AI artist” or “AI creator” or “AI writer.” If you used AI, you didn’t write it. Outlining and brainstorming is essential to the writing process. Organizing ideas is essential to the writing process. Drafting is essential to the writing process. Creation and imagination is essential to the writing process and is a distinctly human enterprise and discipline. Using a Large Language Model to skip any of these important tasks is skipping the writing process. Writing is work, and if you can’t handle the work, you can’t handle being a writer.

LLMs were trained on one of the most expansive and blatant thefts in human history. At least one of my own books was stolen and used without my consent to train these models.

As much as it is in my power to do so, I will not let AI touch my fiction. I will not use AI to generate ideas, aid with outlining or organization, drafting, or revising. If you are reading a story with my name on it (or even one of my blog posts), you can be sure that it is my own work. For better or worse, it came from my own brain and not from a machine. I labored over the creation, the development, the cutting and shaping of these words.

Similarly, I will not use any AI program to create images for my stories or books. At the time of this writing, all my available books so far are self-published, and I’ve had the great honor and pleasure to work with a human artist for each of their covers (shout out to Ben Baldwin!). It’s a necessary expense and worth every penny. If I ever get to the point where I cannot afford to pay someone else to design a book cover or illustration, I will find alternative means that do not involve intellectual property-theft and the threat to other artists’s livelihoods.