AI Transparency Statement

It’s really sad that I have to even write this statement. The idea that Artificial Intelligence is being used to craft creative works and sell them for cheap, easy profit, isn’t something I ever thought I’d have to address. But here we are, in this sucky timeline where AI generated work is being forced upon us, without our consent or knowledge. As a reader (even if I’m not asking you to pay for my work), I feel that you have the right to know how I work and whether AI has any role in what you read.

So, here’s my statement.

  1. I never use AI to generate text. I don’t use AI to write any portion of my books or stories. Period. I don’t use it to generate ideas (my brain comes up with way more than I’ll ever be able to write in my lifetime), or to outline. I prefer to do things the hard way. Most of my notes are hand-written during brainstorming sessions. I sit down with a notebook and noodle the idea around until I have a basic outline of characters, plot, and setting. Once I’ve got that, I start writing, but I’m not a linear writer. I don’t write beginning to end. What often happens is that I start somewhere in the middle, work back to the beginning, and then finish the end, jumping back and forth as new ideas and pieces come to me. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle in my brain. Solving it is the fun part, and I would never want AI to take that away.
  2. I don’t use AI to improve my text. I don’t use tools like Grammarly to tell me how to reorder sentences or achieve better clarity. I rebel at the WordPress plugins that promise better SEO. (It feels like writing to please a bot, not a human, which is, of course, exactly what it is.) I have a group of beta readers who will tell me if I’ve gone off the rails somewhere, or if certain areas are confusing. I pay a human editor to edit the technical aspects of the work, and to tell me if there are areas that can be improved. I’ve worked with her for years, and she doesn’t use AI, either. We work together, going back and forth, until we feel like the piece is the best it can be.
  3. I don’t use AI to suggest text. As noted above, I don’t use AI for outlines, and I don’t use its predictive capabilities, either. I don’t ask it to generate the next paragraph based on what has come before. If my writing program offers the opportunity, I turn off all of that predictive nonsense.
  4. I do use AI to correct text, but with human intervention. Spelling and grammar checkers have been around forever and are built into nearly every program writers use. For all that we take them for granted, they are a form of AI. I do use them. (I’m such a poor typist that the little red line appears far more often than I would like.) However, I am the one who makes the final decision about which changes to accept, and which to reject. Sometimes poor grammar or a misspelling is intentional, and I take the final say in deciding what stays and what goes.
  5. I try to keep AI out of my cover art. I do use stock images for my cover art. I manipulate them in Affinity, adding text, effects, cropping, layers, etc. to achieve the desired result. I don’t ask AI to do any of this, as I actually enjoy doing it. I try to select stock images that are also not generated by AI. However, not all images are labelled clearly on the stock sites so I cannot always be certain. However, if given the information, I always opt for the non-AI images.

I hope this helps you to understand how I use (or, more to the point, don’t) AI in my work. Writing and thinking is the fun part for me. It’s why I write. I enjoy growing an idea from something that popped into my head on a walk to a finished piece. That is satisfying for me. Asking AI to do that heavy lifting would mean I’m in the wrong line of work. So whether you love my work or hate it, take comfort in the fact that it was at least generated by a human.