Artificial intelligence seems to be all the rage now. It is not a new concept; Science fiction authors have written sentient robots into their stories since the beginning of the twentieth century, if not before. In my humble opinion, Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” is one of the best series ever written, and his protagonist is a self-aware robot, governed by his Three Rules of Robotics, although the revelation of who he is comes late in the series. In the Star Trek television series, and its subsequent movies, AI plays an integral part of the plots, for both protagonist and antagonist, often within the same episode.

The last few years, however, have seen the debut of a number of AI programs, like ChatGPT, DALL-E and others. These programs have, with varying degrees of success, introduced a whole new dimension of creativity in the fields of writing, photography, art, and many additional fields.

Are these programs a boon or a bust? That depends on who you ask. I have experimented with AI for creating pictures to use in my blog posts. In all honesty, my results have yielded surprises, both good and bad. When creating a picture with one of these programs, your description of what you want is vitally important when it comes to the creation of your image. I have received stunningly beautiful landscapes from the simplest of descriptions, but have also gotten images that, in my mind, bear little relation to detailed and specific instructions I entered. Of course, I am a cheapskate and cannot justify paying for these type of images, so I cannot complain about what the program spits out.

While I get a kick out of these pictures, I confess to having a lot of concern over relying on a computer, no matter how smart, to do my writing, which is entirely possible with ChatGPT, Bard, Ernie Boit, LLaMA, and Bing Chat. Using these programs makes it easy to generate a complete novel in one afternoon and, depending on the complexity of the instructions given, have the program fashion a compelling manuscript that could pass for something written from start to finish by a human.

I confess to using a rudimentary form of AI in my writing. ProWriting Aid is attached to Word, and I use it to help edit every manuscript. Recent additions to the program are the rephrase options, which can make a number of changes to a passage, such as altering the wording, lengthening or shortening the passage, adding sensory or visual enhancements, etc. While I did not take to the changes immediately, I am finding them more useful as time goes on, especially when it comes to sparking my creative juices when stuck at a difficult juncture in the plot.

This is extremely useful and, in my humble opinion, improves the quality of my writing. Would I ever use the add-on to write my manuscript? Not a chance. No matter how much others praise the intelligence and abilities of these programs, they are incapable of creating a story out of whole cloth, something we authors do whenever we sit to write a story.

Amazon has changed the way it accepts manuscripts for publishing. Now, when I submit a story, they ask if it is mine, or if I had AI generate it for me, which I think is a good question. I have no issues with these compositions, but I want to know who or what wrote the novel I am interested in purchasing.

Will computer stories take over from human authors? I hope not, but anything can happen. Until then, all I can do is keep plugging away.