Recently I found an unsolicited ad in my email for a product called Grammarly. It was billed as a “writing assistant.” If you go to their website they claim to be a free service that will help you “generate clear, compelling writing while maintaining your unique voice.” they do this by using AI technology. (Artificial Intelligence). This was the first time I had seen a product like this actively promoted. But again I could be late to the game.

This past spring I spoke at a local high school’s Creative Writing class and while talking with the teacher after the class he mentioned AI. He said he was changing his curriculum for the 2023-24 school year because he had recently issued an essay assignment and every single student in the class had used AI to write their essay. He told me that for years teachers have been working hard to help students to become comfortable with computers and be well versed in the use of technology. He said now children are practically born knowing how to use technology, so the shift in his lesson plans will be to focus on teaching the students to use their own minds to think and create things. What a concept!

Recently while writing my blog I noticed a new feature on my website. It’s a little lightning bolt in the upper left hand corner and every once it while it jiggles. Annoyed by this constant distraction the other day I took my cursor and hovered over the lightning bolt. What popped up was “AI (Beta)” I then clicked it and learned that I could use this AI tool to write my blog. Intrigued, I clicked the start button and a box opened up asking me “What do you want AI to generate for you?” So I typed in “Write a sentence that is witty.” And here is what it gave me:

They say money can't buy happiness, but have you ever seen someone frown on a jet ski?

Well now…there you go, if you are a lover of jet skis, which apparently my AI is, I bet you find that truly witty. I, on the other hand do not. Trust me when I tell you, I won’t be using this lightning bolt to write any further blog posts! I struggle with the idea of using AI in the realm of writing. Oh I don’t mind spell check! Seriously I would be lost without it. And I honestly don’t mind those little blue lines that show up under some of my words that indicate I’ve structured the sentence wrong or that I should or should not be using a common. All very helpful! But I don’t know if I’m ready for AI to write my blog or, gasp….books!

The publishing world has already changed dramatically in recent years. Once upon a time the only way to become a published author was to write something, send out queries to agents, be rejected over and over, Dr. Suess was rejected 27 times for Cat in the Hat. Then hope and pray one of the big publishing houses would pick up your book. Then you would appear on the Today Show and be set for life. On a smaller scale you could get a nice journalism degree and get hired by a newspaper or magazine, probably start on the “human interest” stories and then hope to move up to something better. Dream jobs might have included being a weekly columnist in the local newspaper or even better a syndicated columnist! These were the literary dreams I grew up on.

But the literary world in 2023 is a far different landscape and I’ll be honest, I am a beneficiary of those changes. In today’s world you can write a story, publish it yourself, either alone or with the use of a hybrid publisher like I did. If you’ve got drive and determination you can propel your dream of being an author into whatever success looks like for you. Get your book on Amazon and you literally have a bookstore in every town and city in the world. You can reach readers so far flung from your own hometown it will blow your mind! With digital books, like Kindle, you are not hindered by paper costs or page number restrictions, the amount of books you can sell in this way is, well, limitless.

If you have the desire, and not all authors are extroverts and comfortable with doing so, but you can put yourself out there and speak at events about your book. You can become your own publicist and schedule as many events as you want. In doing this you have wonderful personal experiences with readers. Interacting with real people and sharing your passion with them. You can do interviews and get that “Today Show experience” all on your own! Create a blog and you have instantly become a weekly columnist. Writing whatever you want without a deadline or Editor breathing down your neck. Through social media and email you can send this weekly column out to hundreds, thousands or even more potential readers. All without having to print a newspaper or become “syndicated”. And even in today’s world your little book can become “award winning” and recognized on a national scale, even as a self published author. It all depends on what success means to you, because here’s the thing about success in 2023. Success means different things to different people. There is no longer just one standard for success. We are all capable of great and marvelous things and it shouldn’t be pigeoned holed into one concept of what success is. Your success is truly that, it’s yours! And you can make it look like whatever you want it to be.

I am 100% positive that this changing landscape, that I have benefited from so much, is highly irritating to those devoted writers who have paid their dues so to speak. They got the degrees, they pounded the pavement, they took the jobs that started them at the bottom, they did freelance work or wrote under ghost names just to get something published. They worked hard for years to try and realize their literary goals and dreams in the system that they were in. And then here comes a new system and all of these self published authors, interlopers into their world. A world they thought they knew so well, until it changed. Do they feel like we cheated the system? Took shortcuts? That our work is not as valuable as theirs? I don’t know I haven’t asked them.

So it is that I look at AI. It scares me and I don’t want it to upset my little world that I feel comfortable in. I don’t want it to change how we write books. However, change is inevitable in human evolution. AI is going to change everything we do and that includes writing and the future of books. How will I feel, after I spent six years researching and writing my novel, when someone comes along and writes an even better story in half an hour or less? How will I adjust to a world where it takes me literally all week to write this blog post, when someone else can push one out within minutes of when it is scheduled to publish? Will I feel that these users of AI cheated the system? That they took shortcuts? That their work isn’t as valuable as mine?

I hope I don’t think those things. Because those AI authors will be living out their dreams of success in the system that they are comfortable in, just as I did in mine. So I would like to think I will be kind and wish them all well. However, I do worry, from my perspective here at this time, that this deluge of easily accessible content and information that is coming doesn’t flood us in a sea of our own undoing.