You have my personal guarantee that nothing I have written has ever been touched by any kind of LLM. I don't even use it for grammar/spelling fixes (spellcheck and human editors are enough for me). I condone the use of AI in any creative field, even outside of fiction or non-fiction writing. I hire humans when I require a skill related to my books that I do not have (such as cover design), but I do my best to learn how to do things on my own when possible (such as book formatting). I once used a LLM to generate a list of random names, but even that turned out to be something they are incapable of.
Rest assured, I have been writing fiction long before the invention of ChatGPT and will continue to squeeze my mind out onto the page, raw, in the same way that you have come to expect from me.
I believe widespread use of gen AI in writing will lead to a grey future where 99% of available fiction is uninspired, boring and unoriginal. I would encourage readers to do their due diligence and only read from human authors, but the kind of writing gen AI delivers is so insipid and creatively bankrupt that this isn't really something I have to seriously worry about. Observe how most small business websites and marketing materials are made with AI these days: Even with access to extremely powerful LLMs that can be directed to design literally anything with enough prompting, they all settle on the same uninspired styles. Most people are generally terrible at this kind of design and have no idea what they want, so they see the basic site/material spit out by a machine and decide it looks good enough to them. Writing is the same way: you don't know what you don't know.
"How does gen AI affect human writers?" It makes it more difficult to gain attention and earn a living. All the magazines I submit to are now inundated with AI-generated works, which means my stories sit in a cue for 4+ months before being read by an editor (shout-out to Clarkesworld, whom always gets back to me in less than a week despite the general popularity of their publication).
"Didn't you use gen AI to build this website?" I used Claude Code to help me build this site, though the design was always entirely my own. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe. I originally built my website the old fashioned way; by learning HTML and coding it by hand, leading to a website that was simple and perhaps a little crude (I'm not a programmer by trade). I am slowly demaking this site back into my original vision, into something I can clearly understand and easily maintain myself. The problem with using AI for a skill you don't possess is that you need to continue paying the AI company forever. It's just another monthly subscription that never ends. It's better to learn and be human about this stuff, even if you end up with something that's imperfect. That goes for writing stories, too.
"Why aren't you protecting your stories from AI agents trawling your website for training material?" I actually don't care about that. There are legitimate uses for a well-trained generative AI. My biggest heartbreak would be if a LLM that absorbed a story of mine then spat it out at some wannabe who submits it somewhere and makes a ton of money off my labour, but humanity has always had cheaters and plagiarists - they're just more empowered now.
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