Sleeping with the AI Elephant

AI is getting better. I might be, but only page by page and not by glut download. AI will continue to produce poetry, prosody, short story, novel, and even fake memoir. I will continue to write and edit at an excruciatingly slow speed (and evidently use adverbs). LLMs will soon (or are already) be able to churn out suitable approximations of literature that will fool most of the people most of the time. Humanity and empathy can after all be plagiarized, by humans as well as by machines. So now we are sleeping with the elephant, and it snores.

My belief is that authors will use AI in some form or context. But the two tangential questions for a writer remain — 1.Will I continue to write? 2. Will I use AI in my work?

1. Most writers do it out of a love of the work, or an obsession. Let's not make it too high and mighty. Most serious bowlers work hard at their craft also, and wouldn't/couldn't give it up. We derive pleasure from the work, even though we overemphasize the trials and travails of writing. We do it largely in a vacuum, do it for ourselves, don't make money out of it, and don't grasp the gold ring (a head nod to John Gardner).

2. Will I use LLMs? Sure. I'm working a historical novel now set in 1712. Am I an expert in the time of the Act of Union and the beginning of Britain? Of course not. Would I use a library to help me get the mood, the facts, the historical infighting right? Sure. Would I use Google and DuckDuckGo searches? Yes. Would I ask AI if 1712 fishermen used wooden or glass floats on their nets? Would I ask if the Scots Lords in Parliament were divisive or subservient? What do you think?

And how far would I go? Let's say that the middle of the novel is sagging. I would type in "what are 10 bad things that could happen to this protagonist." Like a Chinese buffet.

Would I ask an LLM for a list of 20 titles that are under-represented in the Amazon maw? Would I ask for 10 cover ideas based on a book synopsis before I went to Canva to design my jacket? (This is definitely plagerism.) Would I ask an LLM how to use a bump key, or what likely targets for armed robbery are in a particular neighborhood? (Red herring. I already have). Would I call on AI to WRITE the book synopsis given the 270 novel pages as input (God, I hate writing synopses.)? Would I feed in a list of authors that an agent represents and one snazzy paragraph I’ve used before and write a letter to that agent?

Would I include LLM-written text in the manuscript, without attribution? That's a bridge too far for me. But I might use it to write a headline and the first paragraph of a magazine article. In the style of Hunter Thompson.

And here is a helpful aside. The Atlantic can tell you which books were pirated to train Meta’s AI. Only 2 of my 5 have been sucked up into piracy. This poses a double-edged question—how do I feel having been ripped off without my permission, or alternatively, what was wrong with the other 3 books?

This is the link to LibGen, the Atlantic’s data base:  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/