Judgment, Ownership, & Tools: The AI Battle

Are you cheating or being a hypocrite?

LUMICRON CAPTURE | HALLS OF THE ONE—RUHKHI
DISCIPLE GLATO TO FELLOW CLERGYMAN
“The desolation’s immense. Half of the building’s missing…”

AI…the ultimate breakthrough, or the devil? Where do you stand? The hard part’s just getting started. We’re past the point of mercy, so let’s see the blood of it.

In the writing world, we have a lot of tools for making our stories better: ProWritingAid, AutoCrit, Grammarly, and a plethora of others. Is this cheating to use these helpful tools? Is a software making the decisions for you, or are you, the writer, still making the decisions based upon the feedback? You have judgement there.

If you said no to the previous example, then let’s branch out. If you did the same thing as before, but put your chapter into an AI to give you grammatical recommendations like Grammarly, is that cheating? Did AI craft your art? Did it make the decisions for you, or did you, like before, make a judgment call based upon provided feedback?

In both scenarios, you still have agency, choice, to change or not to change. In both scenarios, you created the art, and both helped polish that turd. But does it fundamentally alter your body of work because one software over the other recommended a comma placement?

Judgment and creative ownership are the hinge of my stance.

If you have a half-written chapter and ask AI to help you complete it, is that cheating? Yes. This is adding to your work. It’s no longer solely yours. To me, this is the same as someone else doing your homework in high school, or plagiarizing in college.

One question to leave with you, and I’m not hating on the profession: if you have a ghost writer for your novel, is it still the original author’s work, or the ghost writer’s?

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Well, we’re done carving for now, and I think enough blood’s been spilt. That’s all I got for this round—short, sharp, and sweet. I shall return…