AI, what a subject. It draws a lot of emotive reaction. So I thought I’d sit down, think it through properly, and give you my views.
When I look at AI, there’s a part of me, the sci-fi part, that thinks it’s very cool, and that it’s an exciting time to be alive. And then there’s the thriller part, the one that thinks the dystopian robot takeover is inevitable. Exciting and scary at the same time.
But we’re probably thinking about it from the point of view of the author. And I do have strong views here. In creating Reverie, I wouldn’t have made such a big deal of the feel of the editor if I didn’t want people to write in it. It’s for us, the humans, to write. It’s certainly not a place for AI. If I wanted to build an AI novel writing system, it would look very different.
But I don’t want to build one, because I don’t think it has a place. I genuinely worry about where all this is going. AI is generating so much content now, and then learning from its own output, that I think it’ll become some self-feedback monster that homogenises everything into the same plain and boring prose. You can already see it in AI images. You can’t always say why, but you feel it. There’s something a bit too clean about them, a bit too predictable, and everything starts to look the same once everyone is using the same tools. Writing is going the same way. When a tool finishes your sentences for you, the voice that comes out isn’t quite yours. It’s yours mixed in with everything the machine has ever read. But that’s not even the point.
Writing is about telling a story we want to tell. It’s a craft. It’s something that wants to jump out of us onto the page. And AI generated stories are really just being made to shortcut at best, and at worst so people can ‘churn’ out content for pure financial gain.
So that said, I can promise you that Reverie is about you. The human. About helping you tell your story without an AI in the way to distract you. To help you get in the flow and tell that story.
Mark