An interesting topic came up in our editorial team meeting this week when we were discussing our potential kickstarter backers, and what they were interested in seeing. Personally, the groups who will be the most supportive of my kickstarter launch are strictly anti the use of AI.
However, one of my editors is not in writing groups with that strong an opinion, and another team member said the people he knew who liked to fund kickstarter campaigns really would be interested in funding something where writers were using AI. As a business manager, I am open to the ideas of my team, and interested in collaboration of team members bringing a diversity of experiences to the table. Therefore, I was interested in hearing details about this experience, and point of view.
That said, my goal is to analyze market segments, and understand what interested them. For example, as our team discussed this concept, we thought of some events that exist that want to see artists using Adobe generative AI to create art, as an innovative tool. The question I posed is what would it look like to implement that into something for writers wanting to see innovation?
Previously I have mentioned that my personal opinion is that no writing organization or group should be pushing the use of AI on writers, and leaving people out who are opposed to it. Given this question and set of circumstances, i have also cited knowing artists who do use AI to generate innovative types of art. However, when I try to imagine the equivalent of writers using it that way, I am not optimistic.
I have used AI considerably, for adminsitrative things, and for analysis. It is a computer program, so running analysis for me feels like something it was designed to do. That's something I could have the AI do for me, was scour the internet for opinions among writers on this topic, and break down the percentages. When the AI produced the results of this analysis for me, the percentage of those wanting to see this kind of innovation was still a small minority.
When I posed this question to my team, this was my thought process: I know how laborius it is to use AI. I know the easiest way to use it are for boring tasks I am too lazy to do. However, even trying to get it to write a three line email can sometimes take me 30 minutes longer than it ever should have. If I wanted to see writers really do something innovative with it as a tool, there are inherent challenges to that concept. The AI is created to do things which have already been done, not to create something really original. Writers who use it as a crutch because they do not have ideas would not successfully get really amazing or original output, even in brainstorming concepts. I have a blog post about my test case to have it present story ideas based on a submissin call theme. Could a truly imaginative writer somehow use it to generate and produce a story concept that was aweinspiring? I am not saying it is impossible, but I am speaking from experience that it will require a lot of time and effort to wrangle the clunky ideas of the AI into something that would start to be really innovative and inspiring.
On my side, I'm not a big publisher that can demand that kind of input from writers for that kind of innovative anthology. From the opinion analysis of people who would be interested in my anthology's success, I am not networked with the small number of people who would want to invest in that kind of innovative idea. The AI told me that traditional writers who are ethically oposed to the existence and use of AI at all would not contribute, and I would have to try to do a lot of explaining with very careful langauge about my choices, and that's a lot of energy explaining a difficult position, that I'm not sure my team wants to spend. The team member who told me about this innovative interest certainly did not provide me any carefully tailored language to match that need.
Maybe someone will decide to impose those kinds of expectations on an anthology, and maybe it will inspire the kind of laborius effort and imagination to get AI to help a creator brainstorm something really innovative and interesting, It's not a challenge I feel ready to spearhead myself!
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