AI in Sapphic Fiction

There are a lot of authors in the sapphic fiction community who are deeply concerned about the use of AI to generate books. Not just authors, but members of the whole creative ecosystem are being affected, from cover artists to editors, translators and narrators. And they should be.

Let’s be clear about what the current “AI” platforms are and aren’t. They are language pattern recognition engines married to a back-end knowledge database that lets them recognise how language is constructed, but that’s as far as that understanding goes. Beyond that, what the language actually means? Nothing, blank space. There’s no comprehension of anything there in terms of content, just a set of rules to follow in examining how a sentence or a paragraph follows structurally. You could compare it to a more sophisticated version of the spelling and grammar checkers in word processors, and you would be pretty close to the mark.

And that, never mind the other environmental problems caused by massive AI datacentres, is the root of the problem. No AI platform will ever understand what it feels like to agonise over how another person feels about you, will never light up when that one perfect soul enters the room. An AI won’t go to bed at night and dream of what her touch will be like, and hope for a life together. It can put words together, but it can’t make them real the way a human can.

I know it’s hard, because people who use AI to “write” their books aren’t being open about it, but the quality of the writing tells it’s own tale. Sentences that don’t make sense; plot elements that never resolve, sudden switches of POV where it’s difficult to tell which character is speaking or taking action. Sometimes it will just be badly edited or written books, but if an author appears out of nowhere with a massive body of work, chances are they have used AI to generate at least some of that content.

It doesn’t help that Amazon, the dominant platform for book sales globally, is actively encouraging the use of AI for translation and audiobooks. I’m not saying I have the answer; I wish I did, but what I can say is that any author I find who is happy to use AU generated content in “their” work will be removed from my reading lists immediately and irrevocably. I suggest you do the same