“Are you a tool user or a tool maker?” Seth Godin asked this question in a daily post. His point—it generally doesn’t occur to a productive tool user to decide to slow down, risk failure, and take responsibility by making a new tool.
Enter the AI debate. Do you use AI to create? If the answer is yes, are you really creating?
This is a contentious subject for writers. Noted publishing industry guru, Jane Friedman, shared this message in a post about finding your voice in the age of AI—"identify why me, why now in every story. Find your unique voice—the wonder of your works and the fertility of your creativity. In other words, find your authenticity and uniqueness. It’s what your readers want.”
In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing regarding AI’s impact on authors, New York Times best-selling author David Baldacci shared the experience of his son asking ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a Baldacci novel. “It took five seconds to produce three pages that had elements of mostly every book I’ve ever written including plot lines, twists, character names, and narratives.”
So, if you’re not creating it yourself and you’re using AI, you’re using someone else’s uniqueness. Remember, your uniqueness is your diversity.
Columnist Michael J. Coren reminds us that AI can lead people to “cognitive surrender.” Our world is built on an assumption that effort signals value. A book, lawsuit, scientific paper or a well-crafted business memo carries weight because a human labored to create it. If you can engage a chatbot to write fiction, why sweat out a plot or drag characters kicking and screaming from one’s very human imagination?
The same argument can be applied to writing an essay, an article, a paper, or a business memo. AI lacks emotion, context and situational awareness which are all necessary to any form of communication. It often hallucinates, invents information, and makes errors.
Back to Seth’s point. Creators make choices, exercise patience, pursue good taste, and tackle the right problem or issue. More importantly, they take risk, initiative and responsibility.