Years ago, I went to India for a wedding and I innocently put writer on my visa application. They confiscated my passport and I had to prove that I wasn’t a journalist and wouldn’t write about my trip. I had to go to the embassy and show them that I wrote romance novels, none set in India, and I wasn’t a journalist. But it begged the question, how do you prove that you don’t do something? If you did it, the thing exists. If you don’t, it doesn’t exist.

I must have been able to demonstrate something, as I had my passport returned to me and got a visa for the four-day trip. It was a fun wedding too.

Ironically, now I work as a journalist in one of my two day jobs (and the other is weirdly in opposition to that and I walk a very tight line of conflict of interest much of the time). This isn’t actually that hard because I’m not that important at the other job, so it’s mostly just talking to my boss and giving a heads up on anything that might be an issue (like one of our Board members suing my other client for defamation *coughs*). Yeah, it’s been an interesting time lately at both jobs.

Anyway, this ramble is about gen-AI and the ‘proof’ of use or non-use. I can state till the cows come home that I don’t use, but run any of the books through an AI-detector and they’ll come up with a random number of how much was AI-generated. It’s bullshit. AI is only finding the source material, but ultimately it means that AI-detectors can’t tell if it’s detecting itself or the source material. So they are useless.

Essentially, saying ‘all my books are human made’ is also a useless statement. It’s true, but all it takes it one gen-AI user to lie and say the same thing and it becomes meaningless. And tbh if someone is going to use gen-AI to “write” a book and lie about being an author, it’s not a big leap to think they’ll lie and call their books human made.

So what do I do about that? Aside from rant about it here and feel vaguely depressed about the state of the world and how creativity is getting flattened into boringness?

I don’t know.

What I am going to do is keep writing my weird little books that come from my own brain. Ones that are filled with flawed characters and cute dialogue and weird facts that tickle my fancy, and awkward phrasing that isn’t quite correct. And hopefully decent pacing and a bit of plot. And maybe some dirty jokes and over-analysis of shitty people, and a lot of things that I probably should be working out in therapy.

BTW, fun fact that I found out this week. Up to 16% of adults on ADHD meds don’t have ADHD, but are using them as “smart pills” to improve their aging memory.

This rant has been bought to you by the Daggermouth scandal – I shared a story about the use of AI in it on my socials only to find that the accusation was based on a false premise. I haven’t read the book, not my kind of thing, but it’s romance and there has been a huge influx of new books into Amazon which maybe fit the gen-AI narrative.

Who can tell? Not me, and not the AI-detectors. What I have learned is that it’s not my place to call it out when I have not enough information, and I’m sorry that I jumped onto something. I’ve taken down the social post and replaced it with a comment from the author along with an apology.