FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER!

If you’ve been following the news at all, you know that AI is what everyone is talking about and worrying about, especially people in the arts and entertainment industry. They’ve even had writer and actor strikes about it, where new terms needed to be written regarding the use of their words or their likenesses.

Then someone fed a computer all of George Carlin’s jokes and AI created a new show in his style. That one’s in a lawsuit with the Carlin family.

A friend called the other day and asked me how I felt about AI, since I’m a writer. “Not good,” I said. She felt that it could help journalists and save them time. We agreed to agree that AI could help in nonfiction projects.

Then today, a designer friend who is trying to write a children’s picture book said that he has learned to embrace AI because it’s the new way of doing things. He showed me how he starts with an AI photo and then embellishes it and puts his own touch on it.

He showed me the picture above, pointing out the problems with AI. See the girl with three legs? Or the opposite girl with a leg that is too big for her body? The baby on the couch has three feet. The girl near the tree is missing a hand. AI isn’t perfect yet, but it’s penetrating everything.

I told him that writers don’t like it. I’m not an illustrator like he is, so I can’t speak for them. The guy writes poetry and agreed that he wouldn’t want AI messing with his poems.

The books of yesteryear will become even more valuable now that everything is going to get white washed and more generic with Artificial Intelligence. The old children’s books by Sendak, Wise Brown, Seuss, and Potter will remain favorites as AI makes everything vanilla and bland.

I’m sure there will be many who disagree with me, the same types who told me to stop reading paper newspapers and who told me that what I do doesn’t matter in the scheme of the world. I loudly disagree with that assessment. Those of us who write to either entertain or educate think that what we do is our purpose for being here. We are doing what needs to be done for our children, our children’s children and for all children here and around the globe. We access our inner child to remember what things felt like when we were five, eight, and twelve (plus all the other ages). We speak to children as we would speak to anyone because children are people, too, just as smart as any adult, and certainly more attuned to their emotions.

Childhood can be a daunting time for some children, and our writing can help. We conjure up that fear or wonder, shame or joy. We pull memories out of our skulls and incorporate them into our stories, which we make from scratch with no assistance from any robot, software program or hard drive. Some of us even sit at the kitchen table and write on yellow legal pads in cursive script.  That’s the total opposite of AI, thank you very much.