This past month was an uneven mix of exceptionally busy, quiet and dull. Most of the quiet parts were when I was recovering from the busy parts.

Last week I spent a few days in Chicago with my partner Zyra, where we walked several miles, visited some museums, and ate a lot of exceptionally good food. The food highlight was breakfast on our last day, when we visited Kasama, the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. It was…amazing.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2024 is: Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?

I don’t use AI [sic] for any part of my writing process, though I do write about AI [sic] fairly regularly. As has been discussed previously, AI [sic] is here to stay, and it will be to the detriment of all of the creative arts as well as a large chunk of business, where business is art-adjacent (writing, design, coding, etc.) AI generative tools are, at best, the equivalent of an enthusiastic-but-inexperienced intern or apprentice, in the sense that they can produce something like a first draft, or maybe the rough notes or sketch which can be edited into a first draft. But the process of making AI output usable takes as much time and effort as it would otherwise take for a human to do all the work without help [sic] from an AI [sic].

The one place where AI is an unqualified boon is in corporate capitalism, where companies are riding the hype wave to a minor spike in profits, much like they did with NFTs, cryptocurrencies, etcetera. It’s all glitz and grift, and though something genuinely useful might come out of the current mess, it will likely be something we haven’t thought of yet. As William Gibson wrote in “Burning Chrome“, “The street finds its own uses for things.”

 

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