The other day I had a conversation with a friend, whose young daughter asked if there was something wrong with her brain because, “I feel like there’s something wrong with my brain.” My friend said, “I feel like there is with mine too.” I responded, “It’s not our brains that are the problem, it’s this insane world we’ve let the tech bros construct.” It’s clearly been the issue for years, but the rise of AI has rocketed us into a nightmare.

As I write this on WordPress there is an option on the sidebar that says, “Improve with AI,” and offers several options. I want to use this public forum to state that I never have and never will use AI if there’s any possible way to avoid it, and certainly will never use it in creative writing. Doing so would be a disservice to myself, to my audience, to the literary world, and to the whole history of human creation. No punches pulled – if you use AI for creative writing, you do not care about creative writing. Period.

Originally I was going to dive into all the awful statistics of how AI is destroying the environment, etc, etc, but that’s easy to find and I assume anyone reading this already knows that. This is my simple, heartfelt plea, thrown into the ether as a single hand raised saying, “I refuse to accept and use this system. I refuse to compromise myself and my creativity. I refuse to compromise my humanness. I refuse to use your tools which create nothing but simply bastardize the great literary works that you fed into it. I refuse your trash.”

AI creates nothing new, it simply vomits up undigested food. Who wants that?

The YouTube channel After Skool put out a video last month called, “How Ai Slop will Spark the Next Human Renaissance,” and it did one of the best jobs I’ve seen so far at summing up the absurdity of using AI for creative ventures. It’s less than 15 minutes and I can’t recommend it enough.

One of the main points they make is that creative works are born out of struggle, the unique human struggle we all take part in, and that struggle comes through in the work and is what we connect we. AI garbage may hit those beats (because it stole them from humans anyway) but there is no there there, it’s empty, meaningless, soulless.

What is it that makes us human? It’s a subject that could fill a year’s worth of lectures, or more, but, to me, the main thing is our creativity. Why would we possibly want to give that up to machines? We have told stories since the beginning of our existence, and once we were able to put those stories down on paper it changed the world, connected us all. Science tells us there is a difference in our brains when we write longhand and when we write straight onto a device. Each layer that takes us away from direct creation makes us less human, connects us less, destroys what, to me, are among our highest ideals, and no true artist of any kind would ever use AI and call it “art.”

My writing may not be amazing, I may never get a book published as I’ve so long wanted, but every word I write and put out into the world will come directly from my brain to my hands and to you. That is a promise and a guarantee. Word processors are tools to do that, websites and apps help to distribute them. I am not anti-technology, but against any technology that makes us less human. Write, draw, dance, express yourself through your brain and your body, fully embrace whatever it is that makes you you, don’t give over to the machines, which really means giving over to the billionaire tech bros who couldn’t care less about you, other that ways to hijack your brain so you stay on their product.

What do you want to feed? Your own self-worth, or the banks accounts of these awful people?