“Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.” ~Salvador Dalí
All of us seek perfection, though none of us reaches it. Improving ourselves, however, is the real goal and quite admirable. We should never stop in that effort.
But all too often, we feel we cannot seek perfection so we find ways to shortcut and settle. We write without hiring the editor. We publish via ebook only to avoid the difficulty of paper. We choose self-publishing because we fear traditional. We do not promote ourselves for fear of embarrassing ourselves and not selling what we think we should, so we avoid putting ourselves out there. It’s easier to just mention the book, and hope that word-of-mouth sells enough for us to feel good about what we are doing.
And lately, many are choosing AI for fear of not having the genuine, original talent to achieve on their own. (See this piece.)
AI is tempting. Using it makes you look smart, intelligent, creative, and professional, but deep down inside, you realize that you didn’t do the real work. The reader won’t care, you say. If the reader knew, though, would they care? Would it impact your image? Would you be willing to tell the world outright that you used AI?
The reader will love you more and you will love yourself more if you dig down and learn, practice, and publish using only your God-given talent. Like said above, improving ourselves is the real goal. Ingenuity and blood, sweat, and tears give you way more pride than falling back on AI when the going gets rough. And way down inside yourself, you realize you prefer it all being the real you.
We are our own worse self-critic which dismisses our ability to be our true self as writers. Depending on platforms like AI that assumes it will increase our confidence to write, instead pull ourselves deeper into the hole. Suddenly, like an addiction, we depend on it then we are not writers anymore. Only the few have the courage to take a step back and remind ourselves, like you said “Ingenuity and blood, sweat and tears give you way more pride than falling back on AI when the going gets rough.”
This is my first comment on this website platform. It may not be the best but, it is a start.
I’m in a writing group in New Orleans, and one of our group’s members uses AI to score ideas, fluff his “work,” and cheat in online writing contests. It’s been toxic for those who have to read his stories and critique slick things written by a literary cyborg. I agree with this post! Be your flawed self and enjoy a journey of improving and growing!
Sounds like it is time to have a group rule of no AI, or those of you bothered by it to start another group. One way or the other, move away from that toxic behavior.
I know a lot of professional writers who use AI in a lot of ways. It isn’t really about perfection, or lacking confidence, or trying to cheat. It’s mostly to be efficient and save time. And when you write for a living, time is quite literally money.
I think AI is mostly a problem if you just let AI write something and claim it as your own. But most writers I know are using AI in a more sophisticated, nuanced way. Whatever AI produces rarely makes it into their copy unedited. It’s often a kick start to get projects done faster. And by the time they are done, whatever seeds the AI planted aren’t visible.
That’s a point that’s easy to miss if you just think of AI as writing that a computer does which someone copies and pastes and then is done with it.