I am not usually one to express a lot of opinions. But the world is sort of forcing my hands now because I can’t escape this anymore. Some readers and authors are swearing off of accounts because they use AI. I don’t use it in my creative processes, but I use it in limited fashions for assisting me with things like keeping track of all of my characters. After 80 books, there are a lot. And I have to remember real people too.

What scares me most is that AI is taking jobs away from humans and replacing the things that really make us unique in the living realm: our complex emotions and creative skills. Several of my other career plans got derailed by the prevalence of apps and AI. I thought for sure writing fiction was something AI could not take from me. And now it is. It’s taking jobs from actors, writers, artists, even the shift manager at a local grocery store, and it’s made it hard on all the employees. I feel for them. I’ve had my books stolen to train AI. It is cold and calculating and does not understand what it does to living things.

I understand it has it’s place, and it can be helpful. But when someone uses it instead of learning something themselves or using a ghostwriter or a cover artist… I just can’t get into it because I know there isn’t a person on the other end who felt something when they created the product.

It’s a level of intimacy of emotion that’s missing that makes it difficult to consume AI content for me. I’ll watch it, study it, read it, try to understand it. But for me, art and writing, etc… have always been about trying to feel and to see what was in the creator’s head. If it was just a prompt… then there was no journey taken. It isn’t a universe in the creator’s mind. It’s an idea. And an idea is not a story. It is the beginning of a story. I don’t want a machine to tell it to me.

I want the raw emotion. I want to wonder what happened to this author or this artist that made them able to create such an emotional piece. I want to know the creator understands life. Using AI, in my mind, to write a book a human edits does not count because it was not actually created by a human. A machine was fed an idea to form a product. Polishing an AI product does not count as creation. It’s refinement, editing. I will NEVER use AI to even give me ideas for my books. I want all natural stories. That is my promise to you.

If you want to know what prompted my revelation in order to decide if my books are right for you, you are welcome to watch and listen:

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So I watched this commercial last night, and it could’ve really had this great message about what it means to be a father. But something about it was just not right. It was triggering that primal part of my brain that said something is weird.

Something…. The emotions aren’t genuine… I don’t know what it is. And I had to stare at it for a little while.

And all this time I’m thinking… Oh, my gosh. I’m looking at human beings, and I feel nothing for them. Am I turning into like some sort of sociopath or something? Like what is happening? And then, uh, I squinted a little bit more… (laughs) And I realized that… No. It’s because they’re AI. All of the characters were AI.

They weren’t real people. And… And I admit, AI is getting really good at imitating life. And that also scares me. But, uh, I felt no empathy or compassion… I… I felt… I felt nothing watching this commercial. And it could’ve delivered this really lovely message.

But… I couldn’t connect with the people. So… The worst part of this is that… These days, I doubt a lot of content until it proves to me that it’s not AI because I simply can’t trust it anymore. And that’s not fair to creators.

Those who are trying to save money by using AI are wrecking the creative market for the rest of us. But they don’t seem to care, because, this world, as much as I hate to say it, is becoming increasingly selfish. It would be too easy to divide us and conquer our fragmented society because we’re forgetting how to come together on issues.

We shun what we disagree with or we don’t understand. It’s our knee jerk reaction. So I make myself sample before I buy instead of jumping to judgement. because I don’t want this to tear us apart.

I don’t want this instinct to…doubt…to cause me to pass up a good book by a real author who deserves attention simply because their cover or their social feed looks like it’s AI or because I’ve encountered AI books in the past or because someone is shouting at me that they’re AI or that all AI is “Ew,” and “How can you do that?” Because on the other side, I have people telling me it’s our future, and we need to learn to live with it.

And now the prevalence of AI means that I have to spend the first moments with my content, studying and thinking, “Is this AI? Is this real? Do I want to consume this?” Instead of just automatically consuming it and becoming immersed in the content.

My trust is broken. I have to decide if it’s real first. If I can’t tell, I move on. For me, I can’t get emotionally invested in fake stuff. I don’t get invested in social posts. I know they’re real. But they’re trivial in my mind.

I do get invested in genuine art and books and movies and education and vacations because there is a human being…who has feelings…that fueled these things. They… They fueled the painting. They fueled the story in the book or the movie. The education system is built on compiling knowledge so we can better our lives, so that we live in less pain and more joy and comfort. So that our…our family members live longer… so that they’re capable of more. And our vacations, I mean, of course. Because we want to go out and we want to enjoy things and… in this world and enjoy our life. That comes… That is rooted in emotion.

Now, to be fair to my AI lovers, I do like some short form content that is AI. What I don’t want…is AI in my products and my packaging. Don’t try to sell me something with AI representing the product. Okay? Now representation is pretty key here.

If you create a post or a video to communicate the ideas in your head…supplemental or assistive content that supports whatever story you’re telling, I don’t see a problem with that. Because, to me, it’s like mood boards, things that create an atmosphere to help communicate ideas is sort of like scrapbooking your trip. It’s like each little post is a little piece of it. But it doesn’t represent the whole story, and it isn’t the whole story. It’s not the cover or the book or the movie, the course, the whole social account, the vacation experience. So it’s not the product, not the packaging. If everything on the social account is AI then it becomes an AI account in my mind.

Now, before the anti-AI people come after me, I know some of you are going to say… “Why are you okay with a social post but not a commercial? You’re a hypocrite.” Now, hold up. The commercial was trying to sell me a story that represented an experience…or a product. To me, a post is indicative of a single facet of content type: tropes, character, a critical scene type…clues toward a bigger picture.

Now, I could sketch that stuff. Or I could use an assistive platform that helps me communicate ideas to my readers. I will NOT use AI in my products. I won’t use it in my art or my bookmarks or, you know, any of the actual products.

I think AI has a place as an assistive tool, like for mockups or something.

It cannot replace a person. It cannot replace a personality or feelings or bonds that biochemical lifeforms have. It can emulate. It can replicate. But it cannot generate its own emotions. So it cannot hurt the way we can. And that was really important with this commercial.

It was displaying a really deeply rooted feeling. And… And so there should have been some effect, or some residual effect from seeing the characters interact. And it just… It was so fake that…because I knew the characters didn’t feel it, I… I felt nothing.

Now, AI can do some things humans need help with. You know, pattern recognition, research, summarizing things. We all are exposed to that every time we go to a search engine. (Or use Duck Duck Go! You can turn off some AI on Copilot etc. Just look for it!)

But I do think it’s a bit of a cliff that we’re hanging on…allowing AI to do all of these things for us. I’m afraid that we’re gonna forget how to do the basic stuff. But if this is how we upgrade society, then… I guess this is what living with AI and the future with AI is gonna look like.

But it definitely doesn’t belong in human creative and emotional spaces. It… It can’t deliver relatability no matter how life-like it can portray itself.

So before the pro-AI people come after me…again… This is coming from someone who writes cyborg romances (Sybur Phyre pen). In my books, they are their own entities. AI and humans may have some crossover, but we are of different origins with different needs and different skills.

Anyway, the emotion has to be real, or I’m not buying it.

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In Summary: I am fine with AI for informational purposes, not for emotional purposes. If content is designed to inform people of things, then I don’t care if it’s AI. But if you want me to feel something when I experience it, then it better be made by a human.

Some will say assistive content is fine and generative is wrong. But I think it is the manner in which it is used that is more critical. Is it used to assist? (I’m okay with that.) Or is it representation/packaging or a product for profit? (Not okay with this, regarding my content, anyway.)

I don’t believe I have the right to tell anyone what to do with their content and their lives. This is just what I do for myself.

I do everything for all of my genres. I do photomanipulation covers, I write, edit, format, and market. I am a pantster. It is off the wall stuff that I think of while doing dishes or mowing on the tractor, working out at the gym, you get the idea. I don’t cheat by chatting with AI about what I should write or using Grammarly’s rewrite line editing options. I honestly don’t even know how to chat with the GPT, but some people do, and some other people call it cheating. (This is me shrugging.) I really don’t know what it does because I don’t use it.

My books and packaging all come out of my chaotic brain the old school way because I want to earn it. It validates me as a human. I am tired of being caught in the crossfire of AI arguments and getting slung through the mud when I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m simply trying to survive this new world and keep the peace, which is seemingly more impossible with every passing day.

I admit… In order to keep track of my 1000+ characters across 80+ titles, I have started to use AI generated images to help me remember what I see in my head. There are multiple galaxies of different species in there. I won’t ever use these images on products or make them all public. To me, they are a tool I use to keep track of book series, characters, details, and to show my subscribers to gauge interest on topics or upcoming projects before I decide what is worth the time investment.

For those completely against use of AI in social media, I totally respect not using it, period. For me, I just look at it like: some people are not visual. They do not have the affinity, nor the desire, nor the time. It’s like someone being tone deaf. You can’t train that. Not in my experience. So I accept that some literary-minded individuals who lack visual skills may choose to use AI to communicate concepts and ideas to artists for commissions or to readers in order to keep up with the times and be present in the places where readers are. I have had authors scream at me that “all AI is evil” and yet they’re on social platforms that are literally using AI to learn from their posts.

I draw the line with graphics when it comes to character art in books and on additional products. But to me, a post on social feeds, something that the successful people say we should be doing a few times a day, is just too frequent and too inconsequential (for the most part because so few of us ever go viral) that if AI is used to create a visual (like popular design programs that have AI features, AI generated pictures, etc. ) I just don’t care. I don’t expect other authors to buy art for every single post. Good grief.

I use a lot of my book cover images, book flips, my dumb face talking… and other alternatives for social posts. But with aliens and shifters and cyborgs… it’s not as easy to just throw a couple of stock photos in there, especially if they are going to be misleading because the only images are green heads with gigantic black eyes.

And I get that there’s a whole generation growing up with AI, so that is what they’re used to. They ask AI for relationship advice and basic questions about how to be people in the world. Do I think that’s wrong? Yeah, but I can’t change that. It does make me wonder where we went wrong if they choose a machine over a human for advice. But they connect with AI media.

Quite a few authors I follow on socials (with books I like) use AI and are doing very well. So part of me is now thinking: if I want to stay true to my human-generated content core value, then I have to accept lower engagement. That sucks. But I keep saving, and one day I will have some big, beautiful art to share with the world made by humans.

BUT NOW...the trouble has become finding editors and artists that don’t use AI.

It is becoming so exhausting hunting for this information, that I understand why a lot of people have given up and gone either all AI or no AI.

I don’t care what side you take. You do you. I just want discussions to be respectful.

NOTE: I expect professional and respectful comments from adults. Don’t feel like adulting today? Please navigate away from this page.

We should unite over a problem. That doesn’t mean we have to agree but that we realize there is a problem and are willing to work together to find solutions. The last thing we should be doing is tearing each other down and automatically doubting other creators just because we think we know what the AI tells are.

AI is trained from human art, books, conversations, behaviors, etc. I would know. Companies have stolen many of my books and used them to train AI.

Talk with me. Explain your side. I’ll listen. Feel like yelling and/or swearing at me? I’m going to shut down and be forced to block you because I literally cannot process it anymore. I have hate-speech fatigue. I am just too tired and too busy doing everything myself to filter out the rage to hunt for the facts that provoked such a response. But hey, to those who have screamed at me and others on socials, thanks for verifying you’re human. Let’s just hope those AI powered platforms don’t learn how to bully others like you do. Then we’re going to have real problems.

It’s always watching. We can’t escape it anymore. I have my moral boundaries. And there are things we can do that AI can’t…and things AI can do that we can’t. I just wish we could learn to live in peace, not just with AI but with each other.

In my mind, life is too short to live it angry.

Thanks for reading/listening.

I hope you have a wonderful day.

– Elysia/Sybur/E. L./Amy/Rylee