I’m thinking very seriously about changing my email newsletter to a monthly digest, as opposed to the (mostly) weekly thing that it is right now. Last month, I saw a severed drop in my open rate, and I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s a combination of sending newsletters too frequently, getting too many of them flagged or left unopened (though my spam rates have always been quite low), and not being very careful about what I put in the subject lines, as apparently the ISPs will flag you if you use words like “free” or “sale.” So that’s going to be a joy to figure out.
So that’s why I’m planning to turn my newsletter into a monthly thing, as opposed to a weekly thing. To make up for that, I plan to turn this blog into more of a daily thing, engaging with it more and being more open about my writing and everything else. I’d also like to bring on some guest bloggers from time to time, and I have some interesting ideas for that. Here are just a few of the things I’d like to post more of:
Guest posts & interviews
Book reviews
“Best of” genre tropes
Writing updates
Family/life updates
WIP excerpts
Interesting long-form podcasts
“How I Would Vote Now,” maybe for more than just the Hugos (or Hugo: Best Novel)
SF&F news reactions
Books/games/movies that inspired some of my books
etc etc, as well as the occasional just for fun post.
It’s funny, because I started this blog back in 2007, just as the iphone and social media were really starting to take off. Those technologies led to the “death” of the blogosphere, but I kept on blogging through the social media era, just because I enjoy blogging. Now, it turns out that AI grabs most of its data from blogs, and the best way to improve your AI optimization is to have a prominent blog and post often to it.
So that’s another big reason why I plan to post a lot more. But I don’t plan to churn out any AI slop, though I may use AI for help brainstorming blog topics or breaking down my thoughts for a good blog post. I actually do enjoy keeping this blog, even if only a handful of people read it, so I’m not going to go too crazy with the AI optimization. If anything, that’s more of a side benefit.
What sort of stuff would you like to see me post more of?
I’ll just come out and say it: I predict that the world’s last Worldcon will happen before 2034, and that after that, the convention (and possibly the Hugo Awards themselves) will be permanently disbanded. That’s what I think will be the ultimate consequence of the latest “scandal” regarding Seattle Worldcon’s use of ChatGPT, and the anti-AI madness currently sweeping the science fiction community on Bluesky.
If you haven’t been following the “scandal,” you ought to check out Jon Del Arroz’s coverage of it. He’s definitely partisan when it comes to politics and fandom, but he’s neutral on the subject of AI, or as neutral as you’re going to find, especially in writerly circles.
But here’s the TL;DW: the people organizing Worldcon 2025 in Seattle decided to use ChatGPT to help them decide which authors and panelists to put on which panels. This triggered a bunch of authors and panelists who are opposed to generative AI, simply on principle. Some of these authors—including Jeff VanderMeer, who is up for a Hugo award—have bowed out, while others have called for resignations and apologies. Many of the volunteer staff have also stepped down, exacerbating the staffing shortage—which is why the convention relied on ChatGPT in the first place. And apparently over on Bluesky, the scandal is taking on a life of its own, with everyone working themselves up to a massive frenzy over the subject.
My own opinion of the “scandal” is this: it isn’t a freaking scandal! Whatever your opinion on AI-assisted writing, using ChatGPT as an aid to research panelists is totally above-board and a legitimate use of AI. To disagree with that is to say that there is no ethical use-case for generative AI whatsoever, which is hypocritical and absurd—unless, of course, you’re still writing your books on a manual typewriter and submitting them to your publisher via the US postal service. Or using WordStar, if your name is G.R.R. Martin and you’re the last person on earth who “writes” with that defunct software (putting “writes” in quotation marks, since we all know by now that Martin isn’t actually writing anything).
But it isn’t the “scandal” itself that interests me, so much as what the fallout will likely be. Ever since the Sad Puppies debacle in 2015 (and arguably long before that), Worldcon has been dominated by the wokest fringe of SF&F fandom, and it’s been an open secret that the Hugo awards themselves are controlled by the publishers, largely for marketing purposes.
So at this point, the only things really keeping the whole Worldcon/Hugo charade going are 1) woke authors who use the convention to manufacture clout for their failing careers, because they wouldn’t otherwise have a platform, and 2) woke publishers who use the awards to manufacture clout for their poorly-selling books, because they don’t actually know how to market books effectively (at least, not to readers—libraries are a whole other subejct deserving of its own discussion, because there is a genuine scandal there). Once those two things dry up, and all of the ruin has been exhausted from these institutions (ie Worldcon and the Hugos), I really do think they will collapse and go away.
That’s what I find so fascinating about this scandal: it is so utterly toxic and absurd on its face that it’s going to do permanent damage to Worldcon and the Hugos. The writers of the rising generation who will one day dominate the field are all playing around with these AI tools right now, and doing really interesting things with them. Meanwhile, most of the authors who are screaming about AI on Bluesky right now will either be dead or irrelevant (or both) in the next 20 years. And yes, Mike Glyer, you can quote me on that.
Seriously, though: if the Worldcon community is so vociferiously opposed to a legitimate use-case of ChatGPT—namely, to alleviate the already overwhelming burdens being carried by the volunteer staff—AND they continue to be absolutely toxic about it online… who in their right mind would want to be a part of that community? And since the only thing keeping the whole charade going is its ability to manufacture clout, that’s why I think its years are numbered—and likely in the single digits.
On the plus side, if/when the Hugos finally die, I won’t have to read any more crappy woke books to be able to say I’ve read (or DNFed) every Hugo award-winning novel.
If Andrew Tate wrote a book about how to make your wife or girlfriend into your slave, would he be within his rights to demand that no woman reads that book without his consent?
Brandon Sanderson was inspired to become a fantasy writer when, as a child, he read Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. Sanderson is now worth some seven or eight figures, while Hambly, who is still alive and still writing, struggles to pay her bills*. Should Hambly be entitled to a portion of Sanderson’s earnings, for inspiring him to become a fantasy writer?
Every mother who has ever lived gives tremendously of herself to her children, even if only in the physical act of giving birth. Should mothers have a legal claim on their children, for monetary compensation for all of the sacrifices they make?
These might seem like crazy questions, but when you consider them in the context of the ethical arguments about AI art and AI writing, they really aren’t. They illustrate just a few of the unintended consequences of the regime that many disgruntled and resentful creators are arguing for, when really what they want is a world in which AI doesn’t exist.
One of the most difficult parts of being a creator is putting your work out into the world and letting it go. At that point, you really have little control over what it does and how it impacts the world. Many artists who labor in obscurity dream of making an impact on the world, not realizing that success—even artistic success—can be far more devastating and traumatic than obscurity. After all, just ask Rachel Zegler about that now.
I’m not saying that artists shouldn’t be paid for their work. Certainly they should be paid—and certainly there are valid ethical concerns with how AI is disrupting art and literature. But unhinged people who rant online about how AI is “stealing” artists’ work, or how it is “plagiarizing” writers’ books, simply because the LLM’s training data includes free online content (much of which was posted online by said artists and writers)—I don’t think those people really care about the ethical nuances of the debate. I think they just want to force us all to go back to a world where generative AI doesn’t exist.
Did David Weber steal from Star Trek when he wrote the first Honorverse novel? Did John Scalzi steal from Robert A. Heinlein and Joe Haldeman when he wrote Old Man’s War? Did Terry Brooks steal from Tolkien? How about George R.R. Martin?
Where exactly is the line between the “stealing” that should get you thrown in prison, and the “stealing” that people wink and nod at when they say that good artists copy and great artists steal? And how do we know that we’ve drawn the line in the right place? Would we have worse art, or better art if Star Wars had gone into the public domain in the 80s or 90s? Would artists be making less money, or more?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I ask them because I think they are worth considering. And I think that most of the artists who think they have the answers are really just acting out of fear.
Will AI outright replace artists and writers? Will it make it impossible for artists and writers to make a living? I remain skeptical, though I acknowledge that there are some ways in which AI art appears to be doing exactly that. For example, I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s new image generator, making some cover mock-ups, and I’ve been very impressed. But I will still seek out James at GoOnWrite.com for my covers, because he has a much better eye for this sort of thing, and my sales data reflects that his covers sell more of my books than my own covers do.
Should writers and artists expect to be paid whenever their art is used to train an LLM? Aside from the impracticality of enforcing such a law, I don’t think that we should—at least, not for general training data. Fine tuning is a different matter. If an AI is going to be fine-tuned to write in my particular style, I think I have a right to be recompensed for that—and I’d be willing to license that right for a reasonable fee. Perhaps this is a path that artists could pursue as well. But demanding that every AI company pay every artist for training their LLMs is kind of like Barbara Hambly demanding that Brandon Sanderson pay her a portion of his earnings. Likewise, whenever artists or writers demand that their intellectual property is excluded from the training data, it smacks to me of the first question with Andrew Tate and his hypothetical book.
I will admit that I’m biased in favor of AI, since for the last two years I’ve been working to incorporate it into my own creative process. But I’ve been doing this out of a recognition that these things we call “writing” or “making art” is going to change because of these new technologies. In a world saturated with AI, will it still be possible to make a living as an artist or a writer? Yes, I believe it will, but at the same time, I believe that our conception of what it means to be an “artist” or a “writer” will almost certainly change. That’s why I’ve chosen to embrace these tools, rather than fight them—and why I think my fellow artists and writers should as well.
*At CONduit 2010 in Salt Lake City, Barbara Hambly was the guest of honor, and in her keynote address she talked about her struggles to pay her bills with writing. I assume that things haven’t changed much in the years since then, though I would be delighted to learn that I’m wrong.
Even though I’ve been using AI in my writing process for nearly two years now, I still feel like I have so much to learn. Everything is changing so fast, and these tools are becoming more and more breathtaking with each passing month. Just when you think you’ve got them mastered out, you break through to the next level and feel like a beginner all over again. It’s quite invigorating.
First of all, I don’t think that Nick Cave is entirely wrong. Laying aside how ChatGPT is just one of the many LLMs that are publicly available, and that using it as a stand-in for all of generative AI is like saying “AOL Online” when you mean “the internet,” he does make a fair point that using generative AI as a replacement for basic human creativity is wrong.
What he doesn’t understand is that using AI this way is also counterproductive. He blithely assumes that it takes not skill or effort whatsoever to use these AI tools—that all one has to do is tell ChatGPT what to write, and it will magically produce something if not great, then at least publishable. But as someone who has written several AI-assisted novels and short stories, I can assure you that it does take effort to produce something more than merely passable. Indeed, with longer works like novels, I can assure you that our current AI models are incapable of producing even passable work without considerable human intervention.
This is why I call it AI-assisted writing, as opposed to AI writing. When you do it right, the AI tools don’t replace your inner human creativity, but augment and enhance it, making things possible that were either impossible before, or that required a prohibitive degree of struggle. Writing with AI is still a form of creativity, though it might not look exactly like previous forms. But isn’t that also true of writing on a computer vs. writing longhand? Does it take any less creativity to write a novel on Microsoft Word than it does to write it on parchment with a fountain pen?
Granted, the technological leap from word processor to generative AI is much more profound and fundamental than the leap from pen and paper to typewriter, or from typewriter to MS Word. Speaking from experience, I can say that writing a novel with ChatGPT or Sudowrite feels a lot more like directing a play with an amateur (and very stupid) actor than it feels like wrestling with the empty page, at least in the early generative stages. But it’s still, fundamentally, a creative act—and that’s the main thing that Nick Cave misses in his rant. Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write them a novel, just like anyone can bang their hands on a piano or strum their fingers across the strings of a guitar. But to produce something good—that requires effort.
However, there is an even deeper level where Nick Cave is wrong here, and that is in the unspoken assumption that the difficulty in creating something is the thing that gives it value. It’s the same principle that Karl Marx expounded in his labor theory of value: that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it, or in this case, the creative and artistic value. That’s just wrong.
Do we love J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings because it took him several decades to write it, and largely represents the greatest product of his life’s work? Obviously not—otherwise, every amateur writer who’s been polishing and repolishing the same unfinished novel for the last twenty years must necessarily be the next Tolkien, no matter the fact that their book reads more like the Eye of Argon than The Fellowship of the Ring.
So if it’s not the creative struggle or the amount of human effort that ultimately gives art its value, what does? The same thing that gives a product or service its economic value: the utility that it provides to the person who consumes it. In other words, the thing that gives art its value is the goodness, truth, and beauty that it brings into the lives of those who receive it.
This is especially true of writing, which is perhaps the most collaborative of all the arts. Without a reader to read it, a book is nothing more than processed and flattened wood pulp full of meaningless squiggles (even less than that for an ebook). When I read a book, I care not a whit for how much work it took for the author to come up with it. Same with the music I listen to, or the games that I play. What I care about is how it makes me think, feel, or experience the world.
And if it’s possible to bring more goodness, truth, and beauty into the world by using generative AI, so what? If it’s easier than writing a novel the old way, does that somehow mean it’s “cheating”? If the answer to that question is yes, please tell me why you don’t churn your own butter, or hunt your own food, or chop your own wood and burn it to heat your house—because all of those applications of modern technology are “cheating” in exactly the same way. Also, I hope all the books in your personal library are handmade, illuminated manuscripts, because the printing press is far more of a “cheat” than generative AI, as the last few hundred years of history clearly shows.
Nicholas Cave is wrong. ChatGPT is not the most “fiendish” thing “eat[ing] away at [our] creative spirit.” Our humanity is far more resilient and anti-fragile than he gives it credit. Those who try to replace human creativity with AI will fail, not because of artists like Cave who stubbornly resist the “temptation” to use these tools, but because of those who embrace the new technology with an open mind, and discover that our humanity is not a liability, but our greatest asset—a premise that Cave ironically rejects with his fearmongering about our fundamental replaceability.
The worst way to write a novel with generative AI is to make the AI do all the work.
In fact, thinking of it in terms of “how much of the work can I get the AI to do?” is pretty much guaranteed to give you a really crappy book by the end of it. The AI’s job isn’t to “do the work,” any more than a power tool’s job is to build a house. You do the work. AI is just a tool to multiply your efforts.
But let’s take a step back. Who am I to talk about all of this? My name is Joe Vasicek, and I’m an indie author who’s been writing and publishing regularly since 2011. At this point, I have several dozen novels under my belt, including about half a dozen AI-assisted novels, the first of which is published under my Joe Vasicek pen here on this blog. Also, my wife is a PhD student and research assistant who works with generative AI and large language models. Her thesis is on using generative AI to create interactive cross references for any body of text, customized to the user. We talk a lot about generative AI and share what we’ve learned, so we’re both fairly knowledgeable on the subject.
At this point, it’s still very much the wild west of writing with AI-assistance. The technology is new enough that there really are no experts on the subject, though I expect that that will change rapidly over the next few years. And while I can’t (yet) say that I’ve made gazillions of $$$$ from my AI writing methods, I can say that I’m one of the first professional writers to develop a method for writing with AI-assistance.
And that’s not a boast. Whenever I get together with other writers, I wish there were more of them (really, any of them) that I could talk with about this stuff. There are some online communities that come at it more from the AI side than the professional writing side, and I probably ought to spend more time in those, because it’s probably only a matter of time before one of them has a runaway bestseller and shakes up the publishing industry in the same way that Amanda Hocking shook things up when the indie publishing revolution was just getting underway.
Maybe that someone will be you. Who knows? We’re still very much in the wild west of AI writing, and probably will be for a while.
It’s that very loneliness that makes me want to blog about AI-assisted writing—that, and the fact that I’m still trying to figure it out for myself, so I would love to hear what’s working for other writers. But one thing that I’ve learned from my own experience is that the worst way to write an AI-assisted novel is to dump all the work on the AI and expect anything good to come out.
The main reason for this is that LLMs and generative AI do not think—at least, not in any meaningful way that’s similar to the way you and I think. Instead, these models analyze human language for patterns, and replicate those patterns according to the parameters and instructions give by the user. It’s much closer to how your phone is able to predict your next word when you go to write a text, except that instead of writing the next word, ChatGPT or Sudowrite or whatever LLM you happen to be using is instead predicting the next 5-10 paragraphs.
So really, it’s not very useful to think of an AI as being able to “write” anything. Instead, it’s much more useful to think of it as “simulating” the thing that you’ve told it to write, or producing a simulation of the kind of work that a human would produce, given your parameters and instructions. The AI isn’t “doing the work” for you, it’s merely simulating the end product of that work. You still have to make it your own.
And how do you make it your own? Personally, I’ve found that the best way to do that is to open up a new document on my second monitor and type it all out by hand, occasionally referring to the AI-generated text when I don’t know what to write next, but largely trusting in myself to create the real, non-simulated draft. No copy-pasting! The mental exercise of writing it all out, word for word, stimulates something in the creative mind, and in most cases I end up writing something completely different, using the simulated version of the novel merely as a stepping stone.
So why do I go through all the trouble of generating a whole novel, when I’m probably going to throw out most of that text anyway? That’s a very good question—so good, in fact, that it needs to be the subject of its own post.