Short version

I do not use, have not used, and have no intention of using, ChatGPT or any similar software for text generation, nor Midjourney or any similar software for image generation. To the extent that I am able to prevent my publishers from using those things, I am doing so. No work of mine is licensed for use in training AI, and any use of it in that fashion — which I know has already happened — was done without my permission.

Longer version

It’s very difficult for a layperson to talk about this intelligently, because the terminology is so muddled. I would say “I don’t use generative AI,” except that I know from people who understand this stuff better than me that quite a few things actually fall under that header in a technical sense, some of which are wildly different from ChatGPT and its ilk. Also, there are almost certainly products and services I interact with that in some fashion use AI, but I’m not aware of it. Hence my careful wording up above.

Furthermore, I know there are things which use machine learning/large language models/other things relevant to this discussion which most of us would agree are broadly acceptable — for example, grammar checking software. So, to break it down on more detail, here are my stances on particular types of things:

Spellcheck and grammar checking

I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with using these, but as it happens, I don’t. I’ve developed a good proofreading eye, so I catch enough of my own errors that I prefer my own judgment over fighting with grammar checkers that still, to this day, suggest some howlingly stupid “corrections” to perfectly fine sentences.

Prompt generators

I believe most of these are just basic randomizers, of the sort you could do with dice and a sheet of paper if you really wanted. By this I mean name generators, title generators, folklore motif randomizers, etc. I sometimes glance at them, but to the best of my recollection, there are only two occasions when they’ve influenced my writing at all directly: while participating in a poem contest, I got “The Titan in the Forest” and “The Serpent in Winter,” which made me think respectively of the idea of the World Tree and Jörmungandr from Norse mythology. I proceeded to write poems about those ideas (one of which, “Axis Mundi”, has now been published) that did not even use the phrases from the generator.

Fundamentally, randomizers do very little for the way I come up with ideas. So I don’t use them, less out of some moral objection, and more out of practicality.

Machine translation

I have used Google Translate and its ilk for research purposes, e.g. to take a look at a Wikipedia page on a topic not well covered in English, or to check my understanding of a paragraph in Spanish that I kinda sorta can read on my own, but not with confidence. Any time I use other languages in my fiction, I find a speaker of that language to translate for me or at least check the translation I have.

I cannot speak with confidence about how machine translation may or may not have been used when publishing my work in other languages. To the best of my knowledge, all of those editions have human translators (who may or may not have used software to help), and I will certainly do what I can to ensure that my contracts going forward include this as a requirement.

Text generation

If you buy a book or story of mine, it’s presumably because you want to read what I wrote, not what some algorithm spat out that I thought looked good. Given the use of illegally scraped texts (my own work included) to train these models, the environmental cost of running many of them, and the use of such generators to destroy creative jobs, I have a moral objection to this application and will never knowingly use it.

Image generation

My objections are the same as for text generation. Unfortunately, I have less control over this, on two fronts. The first is that, while I will do my best to ensure my contracts with publishers require them not to use AI cover images, I am not enough of a bestseller to have the leverage to insist on that clause — doing so would likely be a dealbreaker, and I can’t afford to walk away from a book contract just to keep that moral high ground. The second is that, while I do my best to ensure that the stock images I buy for my Book View Cafe titles are not AI material, I can’t be entirely certain.

I will note that some of the abstract images I have used for the New Worlds series are computer generated. I do not put fractals and similar abstractions in the same bucket as prompt-generated images created through the theft of other artists’ work.

Audiobooks

As with cover art, I will do my best to insist on clauses in my contracts that stipulate a human narrator, rather than an artificial voice. I recognize the genuinely useful role that text-to-speech has to play in various contexts, but I believe that audiobook narration is a performing art, and I support the continued role of actual people in that art.

Other fields

Those are all the areas I can think of in which these types of technology might directly impinge on my work, but if there are others that come to my attention in the future, I will add my feelings and stance on them here.