Let me start by stating my position very clearly. I am an advocate of using whatever tools and resources you can to make yourself a better and more productive writer (substitute whatever career path you want).
Let me give some background. I grew up in the fifties as a left-handed student in a school system that rigidly taught all its inmates how to write “the correct way.” That meant when we placed the sheet of paper we were going to use on our desk, it had to align at a 60° angle, from the upper left hand corner of the desk to the lower right-hand corner of the desk. The teacher could stand in the front of the room and ensure that every damn sheet of paper was aligned correctly.
Once the paper was aligned, the teach had every student place their hand and forearm at the same angle to the paper. The nib of our ink-well pens could easily be seen, and as the students wrote out their characters and letters, their hands would be out of the way of the drying ink.
I was left-handed. There was no way in hell I could easily get my left hand and forearm to align with the angle of the paper. The obvious solution to a first grader was to turn the paper so that it was angled in the opposite direction. However, that violated the neat order of all papers aligned in exactly the same way that the teacher mandated. She would come over to my desk, berate me for not following instructions, and shift the paper back to its original position.
The result was that I had to twist my hand around so that I wrote with my hand at the top of the paper, rather than at the bottom.
And, of course, as I wrote out my characters an letters, my hand would brush against the damp ink, smearing it, getting my hand covered with ink, and ultimately my clothes covered with ink as well.
I consistently got D’s in penmanship, and for most of my life, I hated writing in longhand.
Technology helped. Liquid ink was replaced with ball-point pens, then Magic Markers that dried almost instantly. But still, writing was slow and painful…and incredibly messy, almost illegible.
Not a good thing for a writer, right?
My father, ever vigilant to my flaws, advised me to learn how to type. When I entered high school in the very early ‘60s, the very first class I took was typing. And from then on, my penmanship was rarely an issue.
With each stage of technological advancement, I embraced them as a means to compensate my early life battle with inkwells and pen nibs. The electric typewriter increased my speed of writing considerably. The IBM Selectric was a writer’s dream. Not only could I write faster and more neatly, but I could change out fonts so that I could distinguish different characters, emphasis, and even different alien species who used type fonts I had never even heard of before.
As people criticize the use of AI (artificial intelligence) by writers, they are making a ludicrous argument. They fear that the AI is “writing” the story. Well, so does a ghost writer. But a ghost writer supposedly follows the dictates of the person telling the story. A writer writes a draft; an editor modifies what the writer has written.
The writing experience is never a “pure” process of a writer thinking up words and magically getting them transformed into books or media readers can enjoy. All writers rely on external tools and resources to complete their craft. Spell-check, page formatting routines built into writing software. So I wonder why would a writer fear AI if it can help the writer do her job better.
So what are writers afraid of with the use of AI in writing? If you have an objection to the use of AI programs, I would love to hear from you. My email address is: mathiya.adams@gmail.com
Send me objections or concerns you personally have or you have heard from others. I will collect these and publish them in a later post.