I am here to tell you all, as a fellow poor, you do not actually need AI. In fact, the use of AI is making your book worse, it's cheapening your work, and it's turning the audience against you. Because if you couldn't be bothered to write a story, then people are going to ask why they should be bothered to read it?
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| Seriously, you are only hurting yourself with this. |
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You Can't Shake The Devil's Hand And Claim You're Joking
To be clear, here, generative AI (stuff like ChatGPT and its ilk) are not tools. They aren't a fun little prompt someone made to give you a story idea, or a character name. They aren't search engines that can reliably bring you facts. They are digital parrots that are trying to guess what it is you want them to say, and they're vomiting up all their stolen work because they want to make you happy.
So, right off the bat, you did not create the things these engines made. In this situation, you are a factory owner that's stealing labor from others, and claiming it's yours because you're the one who gave the order. That's not how creation works. If you didn't do the work, then you don't get to claim the credit for it. Simple as.
Secondly, and this is an even bigger concern, generative AI steals your skills and makes you dumber. Whether it's this study in Psychology Today, or this study in Tech.Co, the use of generative AI weakens the connection in your brain, wrecks your ability to think critically, and it degrades your skills. So even if there was some genuine need to use it (which there isn't), you're harming yourself by indulging in it. And the longer you use it, the worse the poison is going to eat into you, and the harder the road back to recovery is going to be for you. That's just the facts.
With those two important points addressed, though, I'd like to get to that last one. Because you can absolutely afford the things it takes to make your book into a sleek, marketable finished product. The question is whether or not you're willing to actually put in the work to make it happen, and to do it with the sweat of your own brow instead of just pushing a button and skipping ahead to the end.
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| Take this cover, for example. |
For those who don't know, this is the cover for my self-published fantasy novel Crier's Knife. The art I used is Standing Stones, and it cost me a grand total of $5 to use. And I wrote this novel years ago. I've never had to pay that fee again, or do anything else to cover that cost. It was a minimal investment. And if you go to websites like Pixabay or Morguefile you can find images there that are completely free to use for your book cover.
More importantly, though, the cover doesn't look like AI slop, and the image is credited to J.H Illustrations, so anyone who wants to sling the accusation can look and check for themselves.
But what about editors? Those have to be more expensive than art, right? Yes, they usually are. You're looking at something like a few hundred dollars at minimum for an editor to look at your book. However, as with cover art, there are ways around this. You could:
- Find an editor who has a special going on (common around the holidays).
- Ask friends that you trust and have related expertise (other authors, English teachers, etc.).
- Ask in an online writer's group for community assistance (not perfect, but often helpful).
Anything someone says they need AI for has a non-AI solution that is better for you as a creator, and better for your book. You can get free or cheap art, you can get discounted or volunteer editing services, you can find step-by-step instructions for how to format your book once the manuscript is ready, and in a lot of cases you can just ask podcasters or YouTubers to do audio renditions of your book (you'll likely need to offer them some kind of royalty cut, but you can make it happen).
There are resources and tools available that can actually help you get stuck into the process, understand what it takes to make your book better, and to make it a product of your own work and effort. Some of them will cost money, but there are always ways you can bring it down to a reasonable amount. Because if you find someone charging you thousands of dollars for cover art or editing services, you need to know that is either a scam, or you are paying for top-shelf services that are not going to be worth it for you as an indie writer.
Most importantly, using these other resources builds up your knowledge, your skill, and your abilities to turn your ideas into finished books. They help you engage with the process of making art that is really yours, and that you can be proud of.
Using generative AI? All that does is atrophy the muscles you should be building, worsen your product, and turn off the public in a big way. It hurts you, and your book, and you should stay far, far away from it.
Remember what they said about the One Ring? It doesn't matter how pure your motives, or how incorruptible you think your intentions are. It's going to eat away anything inside of you until you're a hollow little goblin, unable to think for yourself. No one wants that for you as a creator, but more importantly, no one wants to read books that come from that poisoned process.
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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