I’ve been reading a lot lately about the value of friction. Not in the sense that rubbing two sticks together creates friction, and therefore heat, and sometimes fire, though fire is pretty impressive, but in the sense of a human being trying to do something, and having to exert effort, endure frustration, muster patience, apply creativity, and otherwise struggle to produce a hoped-for outcome.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is supposed to get rid of “all that friction” for us. You want the perfect menu for a twelve-person get-together that includes two vegans, somebody who is gluten intolerant, a farm-to-table evangelist, another guest who is lactose intolerant, and two friends who “hate” vegetables and believe every meal should include meat.
No problem! Just ask your AI assistant for solutions, and in nanoseconds… there you go, complete with recipes, a budget, estimated time to prepare, ideal task sequencing, nutrition parameters, and wine pairings. Friction gone!
My dear mother, who could put on one heck of a dinner party, would grieve the loss of the hours spent on search-and-compare-recipes missions that this easy-peasy approach would “spare” her. She would detest the idea that a recipe should be followed to the letter (always salt to taste, never just dump in the suggested amount). She would positively enjoy trying new wines while building her menu, and she would be delighted if her guests found the results of her experiments satisfying. Get rid of the friction, and it would no longer be “her” dinner party. She would be the scullery maid working for her AI “assistant.”
The greater concern I hear about overuse or misuse of AI is that we will become even lazier morally and intellectually than we already are. We will lose our talent for gnawing away at tough problems, for keeping an open mind through reasoned debate. Our ability to sit with a difficult issue while pondering contradictions will atrophy. Why spend years even learning a foreign language when Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and dozens of other programs can translate your email better than you could after three college courses?
I’ll tell you why: I’ve studied five different foreign languages, and I don’t speak any of them well, but each one taught me something cool about English, or about the culture of the lands that spoke that language. The pay off was in the study, not in the mastery. That is to say, the friction–putting the old proboscis ad carborundum–was the gift, not the grind.
We are designed to value what we struggle for, which is part of the psychology of weeder courses, boot camps, church missions, competitive promotions, and parenting. This is how we are wired and how we have been wired for millennia, so how do we find meaning in simply following the directions AI hands us?
I don’t want a life of doing what the Bot says I should or watching what the Bot suggests I watch. I want an interesting life, with meaningful challenges, thorny questions, moral accountability, and work that tests my skills and stamina while allowing me to make a contribution beyond my own subsistence. For that reason, I cannot ever see the day when I will write a book in a process that in any way relies on generative artificial intelligence (and also, because much of it is built on piracy, but that’s another post).
Where do you come down on the risks of AI? Over-hyped? The tech we’ve been waiting for? Fine in moderation provided we have enough water and power?
PS: An Heir of Distinction published Friday on all the retail platforms!
I use it for research and to be totally honest to check for spelling errors. I’ve had to “train” my AI not to make any changes and to only notify me of errors as AI is aggressive and wants to change errors plus change sentence structure, phrasing, and voice. I might just be writing for myself & my family but by golly I want what I write to be MINE not some Frankenstein’s Monster of a story, dinner party, room design that has been stolen in bits and pieces from someone else’s creativity.
I had a college professor in a creative writing course who would actually rewrite our creative writing pieces. Not just grade, red pen or make suggestions. That’s how I view the AI I use. I even call it Professor Stark. lol
AI can apparently be aggressive in a lot of ways, which I blame on its progenitors–an aggressive bunch if ever there was one.
AI bothers me. I don’t like the suggested grammar and spelling comments and the videos.
To me, it’s an intrusion.
An AI program is used at work, it rejects items. I am not sure how it’s programmed but it rejects items which can be worked on. So, is it 100% accurate?
I like to figure things out for myself. So, AI is not helpful to me at work or at home.
Ai corrects spelling…but shouldn’t we know how to spell? AI provides historical data which is often in correct.
I think I will stumble along and avoid AI as much as I can…who cares if I misspell words here and there?
Loved Lord Julian and Perry’s latest adventure! Thank you
AI can be grossly inaccurate, can “hallucinate,” and can fake hallucinating. That’s all pretty scary to me, when we’re using AI to tell us how to conduct wars, business, and relationships.
Not exactly about AI what I’m going to share but close enough: I’ve found that people who spend a lot of time with their noses glued to their cell phones or carry them hanging from their necks (yes, exactly as the cows wear the cowbells) have developed – or underdeveloped, that is – what I call the 0-1 response, as the bots. You can’t have a minimum of a conversation with them because they function on this 0-1 bandwith, no leaps of logic, no intuition, no leaps of understanding. If you want to be understood even about the simplest of things you must keep in mind that they function on this alternate mode and they will not be able to carry a conversation. So you have to slow down your pace, go to 0-1 and then again to 0-1 and so on, just to make somebody understand some simple comment or question. What has always been called a conversation, an exchange of comments, ideas, feelings has become the realm of No-Land and if you are not paying attention you may find yourself having a serious moment of doubt about what world you are living in.
It’s probably my age, but I don’t encounter many 1-0 non-thinkers. I know exactly what you mean about never getting above first-level thinking. A lot of what is called AI is not generative in any sense. It’s simply Boolean logic, which has been around forever, plus some grammar and conversational embellishments. People who can’t go beyond if-then, linear thinking are pretty soon not very interesting… so off they go to their phones. What an arid existence that must be.
Amen on AI. It’s creepy to have some robot ‘brain’ telling me how to think, what to write, etc. Where is the value in achieving something (e.g. getting a scientific manuscript published) if the podbrain, programmed by I know not whom and for what purpose, is driving the narrative and conclusions? I know that I do not trust the algorithms or their masters.
Challenge is good. Problem-solving is good. The satisfaction in pushing the rock up the hill is good.
Agree. Whether the rock is ever at the summit, the persistence, strength, determination, and profanity along the way all have value.
We’ve already got issues. Kids who can’t do math because they have calculators to do it for them. People who can’t converse except by texting. Folks who believe everything they read or hear on the internet. (I usually reference Pierre Salinger at this point.) I refuse to use Alexa, Siri, or any other bot, preferring to look it up myself. Perhaps I’m a luddite at heart, but I prefer move forward on my own terms.
I’m with you. A “smart” house sounds like a horror movie to me, I miss the old Oxford English Dictionary Unabridged (which was sold with a magnifying glass), and a phone should for the most part be just a phone, not spyware with some fun features. If AI could scrub my floors corner to corner, well, yeah, then maybe, but that doesn’t seem to be on the whiz-bang list of capabilities. Why is every woman on the planet not surprised?
The honest truth is that while the computer “knows” more than I possibly can ever learn, I’m still a lot smarter (as is even a small child). I hate the AI intrusions and turn them off whenever I can. I don’t need or want a summary of my emails when I’m perfectly capable of reading and summarizing them myself. I am also stubborn and want to decide what I read and what I watch because I don’t trust most sources. And I often don’t agree with them anyway (frequently the things “they” dislike are things I like quite a bit and vice versa). If I read a review, it’s almost always after I’ve finished the book or film so that I have a frame of reference.
And I love your voice, Grace, and that’s what I want to read.
Thanks. I’m in the avoid, avoid, avoid category too. AI might not be “reading” my mail like a nosy neighbor, but if the human supervising that AI doesn’t have the ability to read my mail for verification purposes, then they aren’t really supervising the AI, are they? And Google is going to force these features on every single gmail user in the very near future…
I read Ezra Klein’s piece in today’s NYT about the ways in which AI changes us. Great read, with references to fellow Canadian, Marshall McLuhan. I’m with you on the importance of the process. Fortunately, for now, AI has not yet managed to figure out how to design and write clever, coherent knitting patterns, so I’m still in business.
Tech certainly changed us before AI was out of the bag, and not for the better in many cases. I can’t see AI reversing that trend.
I don’t know enough to be a good judge of AI as a whole. My kids tell me we’ve been using AI for a long time where it was needed, and the extra server power has helped crunching huge data sets
A friend of mine, an ER nurse, says AI has assisted with some thorny diagnostics and suggested some courses of treatment that in the heat of the moment with overaged, under rested staff has been life saving.
Is a template generative artificial intelligence? ChatGPT “wrote” a 60th wedding anniversary speech for my in-laws that said absolutely nothing. (Hilarious, actually) We took it and personalized it. It sped the process up substantially.
I also know if you ask the wrong question you will also get the wrong answer, which could be disastrous.
Marianne, a lot of people are using that, “AI has been around forever” line, but that depends entirely on whether you consider simple logic to be AI. “If temperature rises above 85F, AC comes on…” is considered by some people to be “AI,” but it’s not generative AI. You can predict with absolute certainty that if the program is working as designed, at 85.1F, on comes the AC. The program will not consider that humidity is low, there’s a nice breeze, so maybe today, don’t come on until, well, maybe 87F.
The generative AI that’s being foisted upon us now comes up with stuff you cannot predict with the same accuracy. It “thinks” creatively, and crunches huge numbers (while sucking our aquifers dry and heating the planet). Yeah, I have concerns.
In the past, I didn’t have to deal with AI much in my day-to-day life, but I’ve noticed recently it’s always present when I want to look something up. Also, it’s quick to jump in before I even hit the Reply button to my emails. I’m annoyed because it takes a bit of time to delete them before I can come up with my own reply.
I feel sorry for present day teachers and instructors because they now have to check for evidence of AI when grading papers.
And there is no program that can do that with even close to 100 percent accuracy, because AI was built using entire libraries of contents (the Anthropic law suit involves 7 million books). An AI book in the style of Grace Burrowes will be based on a word for word reading of every book, novella, blog post, and email I’ve ever exposed to the internet. It should be VERY close to my voice, style, and subject matter.
100% agree that generative AI is overhyped. But my main objections are ethical and environmental. GenAI is trained on stolen work. And their overlords, or at least one, is open about this system of enclosure and colonising human intelligence. And data centres gobbling up our precious water? No thank you!
Gobbling up our water and requiring huge amounts of energy to do it, most of that energy still coming from fossil fuels. There is some hope that data centers will drive green tech, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Mini nuclear reactors, sure, but not solar or wind, because. um, you know…
You are wondering as a prolific author if an AI app would aid you in your writing. DON’T!! You are the epitome of Regency Romance novelists. You are an introspective genius when dealing with your characters foibles and triumphs. What AI app could improve on this truly human gift? Kate Archer has taken an anti AI stance and I respect her viewpoint. You are so talented that it would be a waste of your time to use this technology. IMHO
Joyce, thanks for that vote of appreciation. I do not use AI for much of anything, if I can possibly, possibly avoid it, and I can’t see ever using it to write books. My mind NEEDS the challenge and I enjoy it.
But then, I’d ride a horse into the general store to pick my weekly staples if I could.
I’m old and cantankerous and refuse to acknowledge that AI should take over things like, for example, writing letters or an article. It may be coincidental but I think I’m spotting more errors in what I read online. For example, Amazon will occasionally email me and I definitely see it there. Either that or their staff have trouble writing a paragraph.
Amazon is now using AI to write product description summaries and ad copy, and the ones I’ve seen for fiction books have been awful. The newest Captain Lacey mystery read something, “A man attends a wedding in Lyon and finds a dead body in the street…” A man? Gabriel Lacey, all around brooding and bruised bestest book boyfriend is “a man”?! Did he pop over to France last week, or is this tale, please ye book gods, a HISTORICAL MYSTERY? I could go on and on…
I have AI turned off everywhere I can, I’m ethically opposed to it being foisted on us to the detriment of the planet etc. On the other hand, I am not opposed to some medical/research uses, (reading mammograms to augment human perceptions for example).
It worries me that we are losing any valuing of process any just want the end result as quickly and easily as possible. All ending, no journey. I think we need more of the conscious adaptation or rejection of technologies, instead of embracing technology as synonymous with the idea of progress.
Spoken like a good Amish woman… the Amish use ebikes, for example, mostly solar powered. It is progress or is it a detour from progress that makes somebody else richer?
I’m too old (81 today) to deal with AI, I’m very suspicious of the huge demand on resources for its data centres and of the benefits to what Carole Cadwallader calls the Brolicharchy who seem to me to be ripping off the rest of us for their profits. I have read arguments for and against by people I respect, good writers whose books I enjoy etc, but I am very sceptical.
I like the friction you discuss and the maybe small but meaniful spurts of creativity that result for me from that process.
Happy Birthday, Liz! I hope the next 81 years are full of fun, good challenges, lots of love, and heaps of good books!
AI is a tool. Right now it’s at the fad stage & being ladled onto everything whether appropriate or not. At some point, people will tire of the endless hype & move onto the next “thing.”
Just as I write letters & journal with specialty nib fountain pens loaded with gorgeous inks, there are also occasions when I fire up ye olde laptop to avoid the tedium of doing 70,000 words by hand. Do I run the spellchecker? Sure. But there are also occasions when I have to teach said checker a word no one programmed into it. And whoever entered the programming for grammar obviously had no acquaintance with Stunk & White. (Bless Mom & Mrs Breslin, my 5th grade teacher for teaching me sentence diagrams)
Have I defanged the artificial idiot in my office suit? Absolutely. Have I complained vociferously, alongside many others, about the shoved-down-our-throats chatty Alexa+ to the point they’ve now loaded a brief version that no longer orders me to enjoy my audiobook? Absolutely. But will I use that Echo device to turn my lights on & off throughout the house when I’m laid up after surgery? You bet! And do I use the voice commands to cure any 2AM insomnia with the dulcet tones of Langton reading our Grace’s books to me until I drift off to sleep & the timer stops it? Regularly!
So it’s down to the user what it’s put to. Scammers will use it to scam. Doctors will use it to cure.
I can’t fix lazy or stupid. They self identify & eventually check out of anything except following the herd, whether it’s obeying AI or trends generated by paid influencers. The one thing I’m sure of controlling is me. Hopefully that sets an example. People are already coming to appreciate the human, the hand made & the artistry of people like our Grace.
Well said–except that the assistive examples you cite–Alexa, play James Langton reading A Gentleman Fallen on Hard Times–are not generative AI. Unless your speech is slurred, that command will always have the same result. I’m not as worried about programs that are linear like that, though to me Alexa/Siri/et alia was clearly meant to train us to accept generative AI when it came along.
I’m worried about the bots that lie and hallucinate, fake hallucinate, and attempt blackmail, because AI has done all three. I’m worried about the planet. I’m also worried about my livelihood the livelihoods of a whole bunch of other people.
I go out of my way to avoid AI. If nothing else it dumbs down the brain. Does anyone else remember the movie “2001 A Space Odyssey?” Well they were only 23-4 years off apparently.
Been thinking about that movie a lot, and how H-A-L was supposedly intentionally one letter off from I_B_M.
It’s the AI fake commercials.
Fake products. Fake news.
I’ll never be able to trust anything I see or read again.
That’s the failure of AI,
Broken trust.
Which, oddly enough, is the central tool in propaganda. The idea is apparently no longer to get us to cheer for this or that ideology, but rather, to show us that the reasonable thing to is shut down, disengage, and self-silence, because it’s impossible to tell if any of this slop is real… All those zombie movies were onto something.
I know I’m bucking the trend, but I gotta put my two cents worth in. Since I’m retired, I don’t have AI nosing its way into my life except when I ask to play with it, so it’s a tool for me, and a tool I dearly love because it gives me the ability to play in an area I have zero talent in – creating visuals.
I’ve been writing stories since 7th grade (a very long time ago) and I would have traded my soul to be able to draw illustrations for them, because my stick figures all look like I’m playing word game Hangman.
AI has given me the ability to draw with WORDS, something I’m really good at and can employ to ‘draw’ characters and places that only lived in my mind before.
I get that this technology is gnawing away at our humanity and I don’t ever want to lose the joy of pulling ideas out of thin air to write the story of those characters I’m ‘drawing’, but I’ve found great joy in being able to bring them to life visually.
Please do always free free to speak your truth in this space. You present another perspective–joy–and that’s valid too.
But I suspect the AI companies thought long and hard about how to present their invention as harmless, positive, a toy, a game, just here to help us… no need for regulation or caution, folks! And that is not a complete or honest characterization of what they’ve built.
Younger people will miss out on much with continued use of AI. I have not tried to use and hoping to keep that way for a while.
Just today, as I was waiting to meet a friend for lunch, I watched a dad whip out an iPad and prop it open for a toddler seated across from him. Mom, seated beside the child, was already on her phone, Dad got busy with his. No conversation, no eye contact, no interaction, no connection to each other.
Yikes.
I just finished An Heir of Distinction and enjoyed it emensely. I look forward to new Bad Heirs. (Will St. Didier himself become a Bad Heir?)
About AI, Facebook is being overrun with partial stories that I can only attribute to sloppy AI. AI can only reproduce what it sees. It cannot spark its own imaginative creation.
Martha, if I do not write a happily ever after for dear Leopold, my readers will hunt me down and ply me with good dark chocolate until I rectify the error of my ways… except that I see St. Didier as something of a series finale (I could be wrong) and I am enjoying the series too much to wrap it up!
I am ambivalent about AI for many reasons. Of course AI can be convenient and fast when sorting enormous amounts of data or providing shortcuts on onerous tasks. My concerns are for the immediate and downstream impact of AI on our culture and society: specifically, intellectual property (particularly in the arts); employment; and information integrity. Criminal misuse of AI is already occurring. Misinformation, aka propaganda, is easier than ever. Across generations of the young to middle-aged, career paths have been tightened or eliminated as a direct result of AI. (At my daughter’s tech employer, AI has been been used to identify which jobs can be performed by AI, thereby reducing human headcount.) Imagine what happens in a society when gainful employment is rapidly and devastatingly restricted, without replacement opportunities? When no information can be trusted? When the richest creativity is overwhelmed by cheap, mass-reproduced trash? There’s no good outcome.
The long term certainly doesn’t look well thought out, does it? When only AI is smart enough to program AI, who will control the off switch? Not us.
If you set aside all the individual human issues that surround AI (which would include intellectual laziness, the increasing risk of suicide and mental illness — yes, really — and the ushering in of a “post-truth” era where people can’t tell what is real anymore), you come to the problems with “making” the AI. Data centers are bad neighbors — they run large fans 24/7, they use VAST amounts of electricity. In 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers was expected to be ~1,050 terawatt-hours. Google and Microsoft alone used more electricity than over 100 individual countries. How do we get electricity? We do bad things to the environment. All those servers also need to keep cool, and we do that with potable water. In 2023, data centers used 17 billion gallons, increasing to ~68 billion gallons by 2028. Two-thirds of data centers are built in water-stressed areas. You know the old saying, the wars of yesterday and today are over oil, the wars of tomorrow will be over water. I honestly think AI is a terrible, terrible thing. Sure, sometimes the google search gets me the information a little faster, but is it worth it, certainly not.
I see so many autocorrect typos, even when I think it’s a person writing, sometimes to the point of difficulty following what is being said, how did we get to the point of misspelling or actually switching a letter to garbling a word? A slippery slope when we can’t be bothered to glance at what we wrote before posting. & then there’s whole AI books published, I have in mind about foraging wild plants for instance, that can be actively dangerous. It feels like shutting the barn door a little late, but that needs not to happen. Going back isn’t possible , & I my imagination fails me seeing a way forward. I guess that dates me, expecting sensible control of an artificial construct.