Technology inevitably advances, and it does not always advance for the better. Alicia Rades and I have seen the need to craft our statement on AI to tell our readers what we believe this new technology means and our personal response to it.
Alicia and I are not necessarily against the integration of AI. Artificial intelligence can be used productively in some situations; for example, to help disabled people obtain more accessibility, and to do jobs that are too difficult or dangerous for humans to do. The potential for AI to be used for things like medical care is great. Unfortunately, AI creators are not using the power they have correctly, and are integrating AI to do things like save money instead of save lives.
Large corporations are currently training AI software for them in order to write books, create movies, and make art forms. The goal of these corporations is to be able to create content on-demand that they can feed to the masses without paying human creators, depending fully on AI generators. That means authors, screenwriters, and other artists will be deemed unnecessary. A company will be able to put in a formula of what they decide is selling right now and mass-create the art form in a matter of minutes in order to make the most amount of profit with the least amount of expense. Creative humans will be put out of work, and art will become something that is heartless and cold. Not to mention you, as the consumer of the art, are likely to obtain content that is boring, repetitive, and a cheap imitation of what was before.
This is exploitative of not only humans, but also the AI generating this content, because as AI advances there is a potential for it to grow a consciousness. Debating “robot rights” are not necessarily something that is anywhere near our time frame, but if you look into the news story of artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's 2016 mechanical art installation “Can't Help Myself,” you’ll see that we are not just creating workers here, but potentially other life forms. (If you are really into this kind of stuff, look up The Great Filter theory as it relates to the Fermi paradox to see just what kind of fire we’re potentially playing with.)
AI is continually advancing, but AI cannot make something of its own— it is only able to copy. Therefore, AI-created works are generated by taking bits and pieces from different places on the internet and pasting them together in order to create something “new.” An AI-generated piece of artwork is really multiple different pieces of art strung together. An AI generated book rips off content from multiple other books around the internet. It is more or less piracy that is completely unmanaged, and the artist that is having their work stolen to create the AI-generated work has no idea that this has happened.
We want to stress that every single piece of work we have created as authors has been by our own hand. We have never used an AI generator to write our books, and we never will. Every single word you read on our pages is created and written by us. Going forward, we also want to add that we never have and never will use AI generators to create cover art for our books, or to create audiobooks for our stories. Every single title of ours will feature cover art that is created by a person, and audiobooks that are narrated by human actors. We run a business that employs and benefits multiple people, and we know our fellow creators have come to depend on us. Therefore, we are making this promise that AI will not be a part of our brand, now or in the future.
As a side note, we want to acknowledge that in some situations, we believe that authors can use AI— for example, if an author wants to be accessible to blind readers, but cannot afford to hire a human narrator, creating an AI audiobook and using the royalties generated from that AI generated content to save up to hire a real narrator makes sense. Some authors cannot type, and have to speak into a microphone in order to have the computer type for them. These are situations where we understand where AI is useful.
Yet at this current moment in time, there are no regulations around AI, and the lawless land that surrounds it is doing more harm than good. Companies are not advancing AI in order to better the human race. They are advancing AI to make a bigger profit and not pay the people who deserve to have their creative works funded.
But as for us, our books will be created by humans, for humans, in every circumstance. That is a promise you can be sure of.