JJ Anderson

I recently discussed the use of AI in creative pursuits with some online acquaintances. One acquaintance, who is very pro-AI use in everything, asked why I wasn’t using AI to write my books. It would go a lot faster, he told me; in essence, slogging through in my luddite-borne stubbornness and shunning these technologies is a waste of my time.

And to a degree, I know he’s not entirely wrong.

Despite my ethical issues around AI, this perspective is true, depending on what your goal for creating something is. In our modern age, where everything has been monetized to death, and success is measured by speed to release so you can sit back and watch your bank account balance go up while drinking margaritas in Hawaii, it’s easy to think this way. But this mentality is not, nor has it ever been, the reason why I write.

I use AI in my day job all the time. I work in a technical field on a small team with not enough help, and to be honest, I like AI in this confined context. Despite its confident hallucinations, sycophantic behavior, and keen determination to get itself stuck in a loop, I have found a subset of useful work it can do so I can get my job done faster (for the most part). Writing my own documentation and dealing with annoying code/document formatting is a thing of the past, and I want to keep it that way, largely because these activities add no value to my life or professional development. And yet, I still refuse to let generative AI touch my writing and creative pursuits in any way.

Why the discrepancy?


Because at the end of the day, my day job’s primary purpose for me is to afford to live. I of course care about what I do from nine to five, and want to see that work succeed. But I fundamentally do not care about it in the same way I care about my creative passions. While my day job requires me to reach a certain output or to deliver business objectives on a timeline, writing, as with all of my hobbies, is about the grind. With all creative endeavors, whether writing, art, or music, fulfillment comes from taking a rough idea, assessing its potential, and cutting and polishing it into something beautiful and meaningful, learning from your mistakes along the way. AI takes this away from the process by outsourcing that struggle, and by extension that sense of accomplishment. You don’t have to stretch yourself; you don’t have to learn, and the result is a shallow, generic output that you won’t think critically about because you didn’t challenge yourself. You get out what you put in, and AI can’t change that fundamental fact.

During my conversation, I didn’t ask my acquaintance this question. Instead, his simple question made me realize I need to articulate why I will always draw, write, plan, and plot without AI. And the next time this topic comes up, and I know it will with someone, I’ll ask them this:

Why master cooking when you could just summon a meal to your doorstep with a few swipes of your finger?

Why become an accomplished sprinter when a car could get you to the finish line without you having to exert yourself?

And why write a whole series of books, short stories, and poems, when AI can do it a million times faster?

Because there is no shortcut to excellence and mastery, and trying to take one undermines the entire point.