'Writers' Who Use Ai To 'Write'

Yes, they should be made to feel shame

I read an essay recently that talked about the fact that some people who write professionally are being shamed for using Ai to write. The author argues that people shouldn’t shame them for doing this.

He’s badly wrong.

Photo by Kiyun Lee on Unsplash

This is a really easy question for me.

I think about stuff, and then I put those thoughts down into words. People pay me to do this. They open their wallets and give me their hard earned money. That’s a remarkable thing, and a great honor for me. I’m forever thrilled that people think my writing valuable enough to pay for.

If instead of writing I just put a prompt into a Large Language Model and published whatever unoriginal junk the computer spit out a few seconds later, but claimed to be a writer, and accepted payment for writing, then that would be fraudulent. It would be wrong, immoral, and yes, shameful.

I’m a writer. I write a hell of a lot of words, each and every day. I hope that they are always great, but I fear that they often are not. Great or not though, I strive and I sweat, this is my craft, and I work to do it well. I’m a writer, and I’m proud of that fact.

Some weirdo, claiming to be a writer who is doing nothing but letting Ai ‘write’ for him, and cleaning the output text up a bit? That’s no writer, that’s a scammer. But it’s not a surprise that those who would chose to scam others, to make false claims about themselves, would be drawn towards Large Language Models. Those models were built by taking copyrighted works without permission. The immorality is simply breeding more immorality.

I’ve written here on Substack for a long time now. I started doing so before the Substack people started adding all the neat features and gizmos.

I remember when they first started offering Ai images for writers to include in their articles. And full disclosure here, I was intrigued. I could get just the image I wanted, for free, without worrying about anyone’s copyright. I played with it. I had the computer make me a handful of images, and I included those images in a really small number of posts.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that what I was doing was wrong. I’m not a visual artist, and entering a prompt into a computer didn’t make me one. I was no more the creator of those images than I’m the creator of the moon. I never claimed that any of those images were created by me, but even so the act of posting those images amounted to an untruthful implied claim.

I’ve not used the image generator here on Substack since, nor included anything like that in a post since.

I had also decided, when all the Ai hype began, that I would never use it in my writing. That good or bad, what I wrote was going to be real. The real stuff, from my mind to yours. Including Ai images in my posts was contrary to that commitment to myself.

So yeah, when you read my words on Substack, know that they are my words, typos and all, for I am a writer, and proud to be a writer.

As for those ‘writers’ who let their computer ‘write’ for them, well yeah, they deserve to feel the shame that they feel. Of course the fact that they feel shame is proof that they know what they are doing is wrong.