Where the AI ethics began to get murky.
So, a few days ago I said this: Did I feel like a computer was writing my book? Not remotely. It wrote words, but they weren't MY words-my tone, my voice, my vocab, my cadence. It was like a menu, and I chose what I wanted. Then lobbed ketchup all over it to make it my own. — Leanne Leeds 🦉⭐🧙♀️ (@LeanneLLeeds) June 3, 2021 And I think I spoke too soon. I finished Owl’s Fair yesterday, and on a lark, I decided to play with Sudowrite. Could the AI, I wonder, actually write? What could it give me to start? Sudowrite has an experimental lab with the following directions. “Write a scene summary (less than 100 words) in the Editor, highlight it, and click the Expand button. A good summary succinctly describes the characters, setting, conflict, and how it resolves.” So I did. I delete the documents as I finish my scenes, but I provided it with something like “This scene is written in the first person from Astra’s perspective. Astra Arden, a witch, and Emma Sullivan, a police detective, are looking for a stolen necklace in a park. Astra finds it.” Or something equally as simple and benign. You can see a smidge of it below. I hit the button and let the AI do its thing. On the left is my initial cursory editing of the scene based on what the AI (right) gave me. It was far better than I suspected it would be, but it fell short of being able to literally map out a whole scene. So, I went at it a different way—I described the beats and exchanges in the scene and spun up sections. As I got what I wanted, I edited and placed edited sections into wormhole (which is not experimental and seems a bit less hit or miss) to spin up a bit more. Though halting at first, by the end of the afternoon, I had a full chapter of Magic’s a Hoot primarily utilizing this back and forth. The bones of it had been generated by the AI. Everything started with the AI. All of it. Like I said—it started out as an experiment. Just something to do on a Friday afternoon, just playing around with a new tool. And yet, reading it…it was a perfectly good chapter. I edited, shaded, changed…nothing seemed out of place. It’s like the AI provided an outline, a scaffolding to sculpt on, and I took it and carved and colored the nuance. But I will admit to you, I paused, stared, and felt vaguely unnerved by it. I never intended, when I got the tool, to use it in this manner. And yet I had, and I had a 3500-word head start on a book I needed to write. I’d also doubled my production—I write a chapter a day. Yesterday, I “wrote” two. (Ironically, my strength tends to be editing—it’s the part I find fun, where the colors and subtlety really get sussed …