AI Policy

This might feel ironic. If you know me at all, you'll know that my entire professional life is dedicated to AI. From my Ph.D., focused on multimodal AI and computer vision algorithms, to my career, where I've spent almost two decades working in machine learning and AI.

Yet, despite my experience with deep learning, I do not use AI to write my books or edit. Where do I use AI? Here we go: How to post to KDP, keywords for Amazon, how to buy ISBNs, looking up geographies (my books are set in both my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, and my not-hometown, beautiful Ethiopia), code (yes, code, because there are parts of my books where I need some mathematical inspiration), general Gemini "how to be a self-published author" research, and sometimes voice-overs for TikTok.

As for no AI in writing, you might ask, why?

Well, for starters, I understand what LLMs do, how they seemingly look "sentient", and their limitations. For every writer who uses LLMs to generate a story, they will eventually have to accept the fact that all they've done is master prompting techniques and evaluate the consistency of pattern matching and token prediction. Once you learn about old-school natural language processing (i.e., tokenization, GloVe embeddings, TF-IDF vectors, Naive Bayes algorithms, LSTMs, etc. pre-Nov.2022) coupled with modern LLMs (c.a. 2018) with basic/vanilla Softmax operations, log loss, and more, you realize that when you "write" with an LLM, you're just parroting back a statistical distribution. That's all it is. No matter if it's 10 or one million vocabulary words. That's why everything sounds the same.

That's really all Claude and ChatGPT do when it comes to storytelling. And for me, that's pretty boring. And for you, the reader, it should be fraudulent. That is, unless you enjoy reading highly stylized AI-generated output. How can it be highly stylized? Well, you throw a system message (what the computer/API should do, like instructions) into a prompt template with words that explain how it should respond in tone, language usage, and tempo, so that it comes off as a "personality". We in the AI world, call these personas. This is how many people claim (and get away with) forcing ChatGPT to write stories that sound different from the default statistical distribution ("Write a scenery description about Northern California in the style of John Steinbeck", essentially.)

I am a bit harsh on using AI for writing stories, because, guys, it's supposed to be hard. If you disagree, then I recommend you close this browser.

I'm getting old, so I'm beginning to subscribe to the school of hard knocks. For starters, it took me a little over four years to go from an ugly tome of 200K words to a less ugly set of three books, each about 90K a piece. Four years. An interesting amount of time, because that roughly equals the duration of my Ph.D. Writing is a craft and skill, like knitting, crocheting, painting, sculpting, learning an instrument, mastering a sport, gardening, beekeeping, cooking, woodworking – and honestly, coding, too. Writing is not meant to be easy, nor is it meant to be all that fun, to be honest. Sometimes writing is a confession, therapy, an escape, or all of the above.

As for the latest AI witch hunt, well, it is quite sad but also inevitable. I'm happy to say that I've stored every Google Doc - multiple versions - dating all the way back to Jul 2022 when I started an early draft. I've also saved random sketches in a bunch of notebooks, developmental editor reviews, copies of very, very harsh beta reader feedback, and all my Fiverr chats and Reedsy threads with artists and cover designers. I kept all the receipts. It's unfortunate that I have to "prove" this, but in this day and age, I suppose something like this might become the norm.

Anyway, if you decide to purchase my books, just know that everything you might hate about my writing is the result of my human mind. If it's mediocre and kind of 'meh', then, well, that's my fault and I'm grateful you gave me a chance. In all seriousness, thank you for investing your generous time to read my rant and taking a chance on a nobody author.