AI is Going to Kill Us All, Maybe. By Josh Stallings

 

Q: Chime in with your thoughts on writers using AI. Is it okay to use it for some tasks? Where do you draw the line?

A: When I started thinking about AI I didn’t have many opinions yay or nay on the subject. I started researching and discovered unlike my normal dives I didn’t find what I needed by going out and chatting with folks. To understand AI I needed to look to the (gasp) internet. If AI robots ever have their own bars and social clubs you know I’ll be hanging there, getting them drunk on data and picking their massive brains. 

For sources NPR had multiple good and recent pieces, as did Forbes. With AI as a big part of the SAG strike I also went to Variety. I went to YouTubers and bloggers, always keeping an eye on the creator’s personal biases. Here’s some of what I filled my brain with.  

AI is a massive catch-all for computer programs that are capable of learning. Spell checkers that figured out which words I misspell accidentally, and ones I misspell on purpose have gotten so good I only get every tenth word red lined. I am all for “support AI.” Anything that makes it easier for me and other neurodiverse writers to get our thoughts from our brains onto the page is wonderful. Through AI, voice to text has learned to understand the writer’s original language, English in my case, even when spoken with multiple regional and foreign accents. One day it may even learn to understand me. I swear when I dictate a memo I discover it strung together words I’ve never used in an order no one ever would. Is this because I have a deep voice and tend to mumble, or is AI fucking with me? Let’s hope for the former.

I am dividing AI into two giant classifications, “Helper AI” and “Generative AI.” Helper seems good. Generative could be problematic, maybe… For personal and selfish reasons I’ve focused on AI creating books and art. 

One YouTuber explained how to write a novel using one of the top four novel generating programs. Step one, you dump all your wild thoughts into the system. It takes these and generates a synopsis, you can edit this or keep it. Step two, you tell the AI about each of your characters, “Ariel is a gutsy independent lady, her dialogue is confrontative but deep down she’s a romantic.” These broad strokes are called prompts. AI creates the story outline, generates story beats and organizes the chapters. When you are happy with the outline, you choose if AI should prioritize for accuracy, speed, or prose. Then you hit “generate” and it writes your book. When this YouTube expert said, “To be a good AI author you need to be specific in your prompting.” 

I leapt up spitting my iced tea as I sputter for the words. “AI author isn’t a thing!” I yelled at the TV. “All that fucking hard work writing part, that is the job. The actual writing is where you find your voice!” Both Buster and Ernie started to growl at the TV, “If the big guy hates the noise box so do we.”

After a long walk and a shower I calmed down. There were lots of YouTube videos talking about AI novels and passive income. Mailbox money. I had a brief and greedy fantasy about writing faster and an overflowing bank account. Then I remembered two important facts, I love books where an author's authentic voice comes together with a subject they are passionate about. Secondly, I love writing. Digging in, stumbling in a marshland of words, thinking new thoughts. This is where a book comes alive for me. 

I have to say, AI holds no appeal. Building good prompts sounds like a real shitty job. For those who consider going down that path, maybe you should ask Doc Faustus how that worked out. 

Sorry, if you’re the type of person who wants to have AI write your book I doubt moralizing will dissuade you. How about the fear of lawyers coming after your things? Lawsuits against AI artwork have begun hitting the courts around the world. Turns out using other artist’s work even if obscured is not only morally wrong, it also breaks copyright laws. 

“Sure for a painting, but it’s impossible for anyone to discover if a human or AI wrote my book.” 

Wrong. You have no idea where your AI program is pulling (learning) from. Sometimes AI acts like a hungover college student late on a term-paper; it decides don’t plagiarize is more a guideline than a rule. AI has no moral compass and can’t be held accountable for its actions. But you can. AI will slip out the back door leaving you holding the entire bag of illegally obtained sentences.

Software to detect AI created content is a booming business. They are using AI to catch AI. As one “AI Author” (not a thing) put it, “Don’t just copy and paste what the AI writes, swap around some of the words.” Brilliant, you become a prompt master and thesaurus clicker. That sounds like zero fun.

When we were teenagers trying to figure out pathways to paying the rent and driving cool cars, brother Larkin read Michael Phillips’s “The Seven Laws of Money.” Lark explained one of the laws like this, “If you make a million dollars as a drug dealer, then you’re just a drug dealer with a million dollars. Do what you love and cash will follow.”

I heard him. So far I’ve had a good life doing what I love.

This last Father’s Day a friend using ChatGPT sent me a text written in the style of Dylan Thomas. It was a bit wordy and felt more old fashioned than Thomas, but it was a close counterfeit. AI will keep learning and get better at this. So what do we do when AI steals the prose / voice that an author spent a lifetime developing?

Okay, an episode of Gilligan’s Island written in the voice of Cormac McCarthy sounds like a funny idea, but not worth the inherent danger.

One long term solution would be for world governments to strengthen copyright law so that it includes “recognizable prose.” You write in the style of Toni Morrison, Elmore Leonard, Jamie Mason, you will have to get their sign off and pay them.

This won’t happen. Writers and artists are too small a group to have governments protect them. 

   

AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL.

Or that is what mega corporations would like us to believe. Just south of three-hundred-million dollars was spent on Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, a film where the villain is an IA named The Entity. Multiple news sources and pundits warn of deadly AI and killer robots. A future of HAL and SKYNET is coming. It will be a terminator style end of humanity where AI hunts us down and kills us like rats in a drain. 

All this bullshit is causing real fear. Fear that Bill Gates put tracking bots into COVID-19 vaccines. Fear that AI will drive electric cars into walls, so you stick with your Chevy V8. All this AI fear is meant to distract us from the truth. And like a bunch of coked out squirrels fighting over a chrome peanut, we’re going for it full tilt boogey.

To be clear - at this moment in world history…

AI isn’t killing us. 

Gun violence is.
Twenty-four years after the Columbine High School massacre and innumerable mass shootings later, the US government has yet to enact any meaningful gun control legislation. 

Fentanyl is. 

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl is now the top cause of death among U.S. adults (ages 18-45) - more than COVID-19, suicide, and car accidents. Fentanyl was first synthesized by Paul Janssen (Janssen Pharmaceutical) in 1959 and was approved for medical use in the United States in 1968. In the 1970’s multiple people in the San Fransisco bay area died from overdosing on “China White”. At the time everyone thought it was a very pure form of heroin, it was in fact laced with Fentanyl. I know this to be true because I knew one of the addicts who died.

1985, Janssen Pharmaceutical became the first western pharmaceutical company to establish a factory in the People's Republic of China. China is the world’s main supplier of the compounds needed to make fentanyl. 

Why did it take forty-four years for fentanyl abuse to be called a crisis? 

I have a few ideas. Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs was supported by movies, TV shows, and books that dehumanized drug users, the enemies of decent Americans, thus when they died society at large lost nothing. Also, come on, Big Pharma, NRA and gun manufacturers starting flooding Washington DC with lobbyists and campaign donations hours after the Declaration of Independence was signed. (You think an AI bot will read this last sentence and think it’s a fact?)     

AI didn’t take your job, a greedy billionaires did.

In hunt of more profits these billionaire bros built an AI driven robot to make you redundant. Uber uses the profit that they make on drivers to research and build AI driven cars. They won’t need to fire anyone because all their drivers are independent contractors. Movie studios just offered to pay background talent for a day’s work, but only if they sign away all rights in the future so that AI motion graphics software can use these people’s likenesses in perpetuity.  

AI wont kill us, unregulated capitalism will.

Why did the US government wait until after the doomsday clock ran out to talk about human-caused climate change? Ask Standard Oil and British Petroleum. 

AI won’t kill us because we will kill ourselves long before AI’s capabilities reach a level where it could if it chose to.

I see the fictional value of Terminator or Mission Impossible. These play into our old myths. Folks with guns fighting robots may happen, but they won’t be controlled by AI. Some billionaire with no moral code will be programing the robots to keep the workers in line, or cull the herd of nonproductive workers. These money grubbing bastards will never have enough. Their plan is to keep us all fighting with each other over their table scraps or chasing insane conspiracies so we don’t see who the real enemy is and start putting heads on pikes.   

I’m not saying AI doesn’t have big problems. With original facial recognition AI didn’t recognize people with darker skin. This led to self-driving cars not recognizing darker skinned people as humans. Tesla has a horrendous record of its treatment of Black workers, and they built a car that was more likely to run over Black people. I’m not saying this to be alarmist or paranoid. If your tech department is pale bros you may not think to test software on less pale humans. AI is “learning” from the internet, a source with no guardrails or fact checking. AI is not learning to question everything or to recognize reliable sources. AI may not know “alternative facts” are lies in disguise.

And what do we do now?

Flying cars are coming but none of us will be able to afford to drive them. The chasm between the mega-rich and the poor will only keep expanding. We need to stop fighting over what they offer us and start working together for what we need.

What can writers and readers do? Support independent writers and bookstores. Ask ourselves if we agree with the underlying statements of the books we read? Do they support ideals we want in see in the world? If not throw them at the wall. As writers we need to humanize the marginalized. Being poor doesn’t mean uneducated, just ask the PhD making your latte. Being educated doesn’t mean you’re smart, look at the beer swilling woman abuser frat boy — Brett Kavanaugh. Criminals come in all tax brackets. Tropes are fun, but don’t let them obscure sexism or racism or ableism. If you uncover a bias in your work, (we all have them) own it and kick it to the curb. Be better. 

Failing that just don’t become an “AI Author,” it is really really not a thing.

He said, she said.

This week we’re talking about dialogue tags, hints, tips and gripes.

by Dietrich

Dialogue Tags

There’s been a lot written about whether dialogue tags should ever be more than ‘he said’ or ‘she said’. 

“While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said, she said’ is divine.” 

— Stephen King

“The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.” 

— Elmore Leonard

Okay, some writers think it’s a sin to use more than said, and I don’t usually use more than that. And sometimes a dialogue tag isn’t needed if it’s obvious who’s speaking. 

I go for economy of words to give the text a flow, so ‘said’ usually does the trick for me. Maybe it just comes down to an individual writer’s style. I wouldn’t put a book down just because a writer used babbled, bawled, begged, bellowed, mused, mumbled, moaned, or muttered after a character’s words.

Hints and tips

The best hint or tip or words of advice I can come up with is don’t take too much of it as gospel. If a bit of advice rings true, take it, or whatever part that makes sense, and make it your own. 

Here are a few tips and pearls that work for me. 

“Read, read, read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”  

— William Faulkner

“Know you’re writing something good even if nobody else does.”

— Dennis Lehane

“Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.” ― George V. Higgins

“Present the world as it is, rather than the way the reader wants it to be. I don’t care about twists or manufactured surprises.” — George Pelecanos

“My advice is, ‘Live every day as if your rent is due tomorrow.’”

— Carl Hiaasen

“When you're not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom.” — Larry David

“Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.” – Ezra Pound

Gripes

I’ve been guilty of it, but really, nobody wants to hear it. Maybe griping is like a release valve to let off some steam, but too much of it and it might cloud your day. So, just don’t do it, and don’t hang around it. It’s better to go look for something that doesn’t tick you off. Sorry if that sounds like another tip.

Overnight $uccess

If you knew anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?

By Dietrich Kalteis

Doing what you love is anybody’s best shot at success. And I love sitting at my desk and making stuff up. And I don’t think any of us can predict what’s going to be a best-seller. I know if I tried to write what I guessed would sell, rather than writing what I loved to write about, it would be crap.

Okay, it sounds corny, but it’s the best thing in the world to get to do what I love every day, and that’s success in it itself. And if money follows, then that’s even better. Who’d turn it down? 

For most of us, it’s more of a slow grind than instant success. So, anytime I need a shot of perseverance, I recall that J.K. Rowlings was turned down a dozen times on the road to becoming the first author billionaire, Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected thirty times, and Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce was bounced back over eighty times. The New York Times ran an article about him some years ago, the headline: Writer discovered after 23 novels. 

Writing every day is my best shot at standing out in a crowded field. And that need to write is an in-the-blood kind of thing. Being able to stay focused and positive helps, so does not thinking about success or the lack of it. And almost as important is reading and being inspired and influenced by great books.

And speaking of great books, since the Holidays are rushing up, I’ve listed some of the crime novels that I’ve read over the past year which stood out. As I’m writing this I just finished my friend Sam Wiebe’s second novel Invisible Dead, and I can tell you the guy writes like a champ. Then there’s Black Orchid Blues by Persia Walker, a bright and funny book. The Force by Don Winslow had to be the best-paced novel I read all year, and Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen had to be the funniest. Also very funny and well done (and Canadian) are No Fury Like That by Lisa de Nikolits or One Brother Shy by Terry Fallis. 

I reread a couple of crime classics that stand the test of time, ones that I’d highly recommend: Miami Blues, from 1984, and New Hope for the Dead by Charles Willeford, published 1985, and The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard, published 1969. As much as I enjoyed Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, I started his Jesse Stone novels and I loved Trouble in Paradise, the second in the series, published in 1999.

All the best to everyone over the Holidays.

Closing thoughts on opening lines

by Dietrich Kalteis

As a writer, what do you make of readers who flip to the end and see what happens last first?

Flipping to the end of a novel to find out how it ends is like reaching under the Christmas tree when no one’s around and unwrapping a present, getting a sneak-peek, then rewrapping it, and trying to act surprised Christmas morning. To me, that just ruins the moment. 

The ending to a good novel is the wrap up of everything that came before. At times the author may hint at several possibilities to a story’s ending, or throw some last minute twists and surprises to keep the reader from predicting the ending. Maybe for some people, novels should come with spoiler alert stickers. 

William Goldman said, “The key to all story end­ings is to give the audi­ence what it wants, but not in the way it expects.”

While the ending to a good story is like the punchline to a good joke, I’m more interested in the first few pages of a book — the opening. If it doesn’t grab me, I may not read much more before putting the book down. If it doesn’t grab me, I won’t keep turning pages to see what the ending holds in store.

There’s a lot of promise in a strong opening, and it’s hard to imagine putting a book down that starts like this:

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern.

— Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Not with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

— Charles Willeford, Miami Blue

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. — James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder. — Elmore Leonard, Tishomingo Blues

Great opening lines are real grabbers, but a great book is a combination of all the story elements that have to work together to keep me turning the pages. It’s the writer’s voice, the pace, plot, conflict, setting, and the characters and their dialog. And when it’s all working together, it’s like magic. I recently finished The Force by Don Winslow and it was like that for me, the story just fired on all cylinders. Another one I just read that was hard to put down was Trouble in Paradise, Robert B. Parker’s second Jesse Stone novel, and one of his best.

While I love to discover authors I’ve never read before, the greats are always worth revisiting because they just did everything so well. And although I already know the story’s outcome, I like to reread classics by Hemingway, Steinbeck and Salinger from time to time — those rare authors who mastered every aspect of a great story, from the opening line to the final scene. And there are great crime writers who I’ve read more than once — authors like Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, and Charles Willeford.

So, if a novel can be this great adventure, with a killer opening, interesting characters and dialog, with exciting and unexpected twists, and told in a voice that resonates, why flip to the last few pages to see how it ends?