Earlier this year, I was invited to try out a new feature in Notion, the notetaking/productivity/database program I use for writing projects. Notion AI is similar to ChatGPT in that it uses AI to help you brainstorm, outline, and even write first drafts. Already many writers were decrying the use of AI on social media, so I ignored the invite at first; seemed a lot more trouble than it was worth.

Then Clarkesworld Magazine got hit with a whole slew of AI-generated stories and spam submissions. Suddenly, everyone had an opinion on whether AI was going to put writers out of business, similar to the conversations happening in the digital artist world. Magazines started putting up notices that they wouldn’t accept any work that were created or enhanced by AI…which I found vague. Just what does that mean? Did they mean stories that are AI generated and barely revised by the submitter? Or did that also mean stories that started off as AI generated but then rewritten by the author into something completely different? What about programs such as Grammarly which uses AI to suggest better words and clearer sentences? Where do we draw the line? How can you even tell if a story is written by an AI or an actual author?

This made me decide to sign up for the Notion AI feature. I wondered—is it really possible to tell if something is AI written versus written by a human?

To test it out, I asked Notion AI to take all the bits and pieces of notes I dumped in a brainstorming folder and create a newsletter. And it did. Surprisingly so. Way quicker than if I wrote it out on my own. And it even added some bits that I wouldn’t have added on my own. I briefly wrote about this process in my latest newsletter, but I was surprised at how…insightful…it sounded.

Oh, I thought. This changes things.

Once upon a time, I used to love the Internet.

It was shiny and new and I got to meet so many interesting people. It was a great way to keep in touch with folks and reconnect with friends I hadn’t seen in years. I had the entire speculative writing community at my fingertips. I had access to the most amazing conversations anytime, anywhere. It was like I suddenly gained telepathy with everyone in the whole world.

It was awesome. Until it wasn’t.

Social networks pushed algorithms over content. The algorithms prioritized the angriest, most outraged voices. People became meaner. Oh, and doxxing, don’t forget doxxing. It became harder to say anything among the onslaught of words. It became harder to promote myself, harder to speak my thoughts, while also constantly pressured to say something right now now now now now.

So many other voices had so many opinions and could say things much better than I could anyway. And they could do it faster, whereas I wanted to take my time to think and reflect before posting my thoughts. By the time I had something to say, people had moved on to the next controversy.

It just became easier to not say anything at all. Gradually, I stopped posting on social media and put my blog on hiatus. I wanted to direct my energy towards writing projects that needed my creativity.

Then comes this tool, which is supposed to help us communicate easier and write better. And for the first time, I was inspired to write about it now.

I did an informal poll of writers asking if they would use AI for their work. While a couple responded that they did, a whopping majority refused to even consider it.

Several of my non-writer friends, however, have no compunction about using AI. One uses AI to write for summaries of policies for his company. Another creates newsletters with AI to his donors. Still another generates promotion tweets with AI because they absolutely hate promoting themselves.

(Interestingly, the non-writer friends who really liked using AI are white males while my writer friends are more diverse.)

When I played with the AI, I saw it was good at generating brainstorming lists—I asked it to come up with things one would see on a city block, and it gave me details like people jogging, biking, chasing ice cream trucks, kids playing, etc. I could ask the AI for the correct names of a nun’s habit, which can help me stay in the flow of writing. It allowed me to experiment with different writing exercises. I can see it speeding up the revision process by coming up with better and more precise terms. It’s like a glorified thesaurus in that way.

I could see how it could work for people like myself who have very limited time to write. I tend to throw a lot of my story and essay ideas into bullet points as sort of a brainstorming catchall, but it takes a while for me to shape it into a first draft. AI could take all those points and put them into a workable draft I can then revise and refine separately.

Beyond that, it can help with those who struggle with writer’s block or imposter syndrome. AI can help reduce that initial intimidation of the blank page, making it easier for cowed writers who struggle with that to push forward and get them writing. I always wanted to write pitches but never had the time to do so (and truth be told, I found it daunting). But generate a list of pitches and I can get ideas on what to say. Teachers could use it as examples of essays in ESL classes. It could be used in weeding out stupid questions for customer service. It can cut down on the stupid busy work and help writers focus on shaping words. It could also help those like me who want to write, but are burdened by their own anxiety, the harshness of social media, and hustle culture as a whole. It can even make writing prompts fun—just ask the AI to generate a list of ideas, pick one and start writing.

I could see so many possibilities.

But now let me put on my editor’s hat.

Let’s return to my example of the newsletter. Remember the bits I mentioned earlier? The AI inserted the following paragraph towards the end that wasn’t based on any of my notes:

Life can be unpredictable, but I’m learning to embrace the journey and appreciate the moments that matter most. I hope you’ll join me on this adventure, and I look forward to sharing more updates with you in the future.

Thank you for reading, and take care.

Insightful, right? That sounds a lot like something I would write. Disturbingly so. If I’m tired and pressed for time, I could’ve used that to sign off my newsletter, because I sucked at signoffs. Who would know? It sounds like me. It’s personal like me.

Except…that’s not me.

One of the hardest advice for new writers to follow is how to find their writing voice. It’s not something that can be readily taught. The way I write has stylistic choices that are unique to me. I like to put emphatic points on a single line. I tend to use fragments. Parentheses if I’m feeling particularly humorous. Also, italics. I really, really like italics.

(Also if I can really pull it off, going meta in my writing. Self-awareness makes me giggle.)

That’s something AI can’t pull off. It knows how to put together story elements, but it doesn’t have that spark that makes a story catch my eye as an editor and a reader. The AI can only put together the most statistically likely words and phrases to create what you ask of it. In other words, it can only output clichés that are too general, too bland. It can only put together what it’s been given.

And that’s what it’s supposed to do.

Until you bring actual writers into the equation.

Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to write a story about dancing crows. The first paragraph was pretty bland: The crows had always been an enigma to the people of the small town. They roosted in the tall trees on the outskirts, their caws echoing through the streets at odd hours. But one day, something strange happened.

Not really a stand out paragraph. But then, I asked the AI to rewrite the same story, but in the style of, oh, let’s say Neil Gaiman. And it gave me this:

It was the crows that drew the eye, perched on the wires like black notes on a musical score. They were always there, watching, waiting, until one day, they began to dance.

It started with a single bird, a jester in black, hopping from wire to wire, its wings flapping in time to a beat only it could hear. Then another joined in, and another, until the entire row of crows was moving as one. They danced like they had all the time in the world, like they knew something the humans didn’t.

That’s…good.

That’s really good.

That’s awfully scary good.

Again, the whole story is not that great. But it uses some gorgeous imagery. It has a beginning and an end. Heck, I’m tempted to use it in a short story. But it’s one thing to attempt to write like Neil Gaiman—not only is it a good writing exercise, but it’s a way to improve your craft. But to just use AI-generated words in the style of any writer and present it as your own? It’s plagiarism in a nutshell—in fact, I ran the above passage through an AI-detector, and it came back with the response that it was 100% written by an AI.

Let’s dig a little deeper. In order to populate its data, AI must pull its data from accessible sources, i.e. the Internet. This means anything is fair game if it’s on the Internet for free, even if it’s under a copyright. For written works, this includes sites like Wikipedia. Public articles. Forums. Free magazine sites that don’t use paywalls. Literary magazines such as the one you’re reading right now.

Even fanfiction. Many people write fanfiction with the intended purpose to not charge for their content. To do so would violate the copyright of the authors/owners of these characters. But most fanfic writers aren’t doing it for money. They love the characters so much they want to see more stories with them, stay in these worlds more. Many queer and POC people are able to explore and expand their identities and imaginations through writing fanfic.

Now here is an AI that gathers all the fanfiction it can and mashes them together for its own purposes. If it is prompted to tell you a story using characters already established in a property, such as Marvel or Genshin Impact, it pulls from all those fanfics and gives you the most statistically logical story set in that universe. Most people like to play with it for fun to see what it comes up with. And it’s using fanfiction, which is not being written for money. No one’s profiting from it.

Except that’s not true.

For now, ChatGPT is free to use, but there’s also a paid option that will get you quicker response times and better support, and unlimited processes. You’re paying to get better access. Notion AI gives you a set number of complimentary prompts, but once you run out, you need to pay to continue using the program.  

Suddenly, something which was meant to be free isn’t.

In a sense, it’s like Spotify. It gathers information to in a handy single place, then charges a fee if you want more access. At least, Spotify pays its content holders—granted it’s not much, but at least they get something. The artists and writers whose work are used to populate the AI? They won’t see a single cent.

This is why so many artists, both visual and writers, are up in arms over this. In the race to get more content out quicker, writers and artists are being dumped to satisfy the craving of getting media content now now now now without having to pay creators.

And who’s to say companies need people at all? Levi’s Jeans just made a press release announcing that they are partnering with a digital fashion studio to make custom AI models, which they say is “increasing the number and diversity of our models for our products in a sustainable way.” In other words, finding and paying actual diverse models cost too much so we’re going with AI models instead? 

Suddenly, those artists who refuse to have anything to do with AI make a lot more sense.

Which brings me back to Notion AI.

I could have used AI to write this essay. Would have been simple. But this essay came from five different conversations, some online, some in person. I then threw my notes into an outline (it was the first time I actually woke up at 4:30 in the morning and was like oo, I have ideas. Let me write them all down before I forget). Then I let it sit for a couple of days; by the time I was ready to write, I was able to use the outline to come up with my essay draft. The only time I used AI was to generate my AI examples and this essay’s title, which I immediately scrapped days later when I came up with a better title all on my own.

The words you’re reading now are the culmination of my experiences. They are infused with my writing style, which I’ve honed for many years. You’re reading my voice. I dare say you’re reading my spirit.

Now granted, this is an essay, so this is something where my opinion is allowed. I haven’t tested this on actual articles, but considering that articles need to be verified to be factually true, AI won’t help in that regard. It is notorious for putting out errors. The human element is still needed to do research, perform fact checks, judge what remains and what needs to be cut out and tightened. AI is also very biased and does not do well in describing people of color, the disabled, and queer folk in a realistic way. Most of the content the AI is trained on doesn’t view these groups as people, and so its output would reflect that. Garbage in…garbage out, so to speak.

AI is meant to be a starting point. We still need to talk to people. We still need to do the research. We still need to interact with people for ideas to ignite, and we need to do the work of molding those ideas together into the shape of an essay or a story.

I don’t know what the future of writing is, but I doubt AI is the death of fiction as we know it. And yet, I can’t really justify using AI to help me write my stories either. So, I don’t plan to pay to continue using Notion AI. I can get along well without it.

True, it’s likely magazines will see more AI-created content, particularly stories that are sent to us without the author checking out our guidelines or reading back issues to see what type of stories we’re looking for. In a way, however, that’s no different from a non-AI writer who doesn’t take time to do their research. At GigaNotoSaurus, the magazine I edit, we get plenty of those stories, and those get easily rejected. And let’s face it, formulaic stories still sell. But for every general story out there, there are also stories that will make me sit back and go, ohhhh, and then proceed to live in my head rent-free for months.

Those are the stories that make me take notice and eventually buy.

But I also get it. I worry for those authors who do choose to use AI tools for the reasons I mention above and being absolutely vilified by their peers (because we writers don’t have opinions at all). AI is simply that—a tool. It’s an artificial assistant. It’s not meant to be an author by itself. And I think there can be ways to make AI generate money in a good way for writers. I’m thinking of how writers I know use Midjourney to help visualize scenes to help them write better. If there was some way artists could program a Midjourney-like app, populate it with their own works, then have writers subscribe to their content to generate writing prompts, then that would be a way to bring money back to the artists. They can then focus on commissioned work, which I doubt will go away. Customized art will never take the place of mass-produced work.

Perhaps all this conversation should make us deeply consider how we consume our media. Maybe we need to become more intentional in what we view—instead of consuming so much media that’s available for free on the Internet, pointedly use our dollars to invest in a few sources: your favorite magazine, newspaper, musical artist. Buy art from your favorite creative.

And most of all, maybe we as writers need to not buy into the whole now now now now pressure of hustle culture. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to. Sadly, we don’t. So it’s up to us to figure out how to make AI work for us and not harm us.

I may still use it for tweets though. Stupid Twitter don’t deserve my pithy quips.

© 2023 LaShawn M. Wanak