One person's trash is another person's treasure... and that's ok.

Writing, for me, is both extremely rewarding and extremely frustrating. I write these novels and stories because I need to. It's part ministry-- I convey a lot of my spiritual and metaphysical philosophy in the pages of my books. It's also part philosophy, the place where I examine how humans interact with each other. We learn a lot about how to be human beings through storytelling, whether it's fiction or not, and I like to teach about the human condition.

What's difficult about this process, for me and other authors, is that it's hard to find the people who would want to listen and my stories. It's a massive industry. The capitalist side of publishing as it is now, indie or traditional, tends to keep new authors from really gaining traction. For example, if you sell your ebooks on Amazon, you have to post new things every other month, or your books will end up being pushed out of discoverability by Amazon's algorithm. If I take my time to write more, and there aren't enough sales in between releases, Amazon will make your work virtually disappear to the point where you won't be able to find the books even if you search by the title and author's name. (It's part of the reason why I pulled my books from Amazon. It wasn't worth keeping them on the platform.)

The other difficult side of things for authors right now, especially for indie authors, is AI. There's a strong anti-AI movement, and while I agree that AI sucks, the fact that there's now a lot of people now who are quick to accuse authors of "using AI" even if they haven't, is incredibly disheartening and scary. Many of these accusers insist that they can tell what's AI and what's not on sight (most saying "they just know"), when in reality, it's nigh impossible. They insist that there's certain tells through bad grammar or weird punctuation, but there's no way to truly tell. The text that AI produces is built on the full text of the English language available on the internet and when it creates a paragraph, it's doing a kind of "average" of human writing, even if you ask it to do a certain style. That will include things like em dashes, more formal styles, and inflated prose.

But "bad" writing is purely subjective. Humans have different writing styles. Some are more formal than others, and that's not a sign of how good or not the writing is, nor is it a sign of AI. It's just writing.

To give a little perspective: in the 80s and 90s, before the full force of the internets, I used to pick up random novels from the department store's book section and read them. Mostly to get out of my comfort zone, and after a while, bodice rippers became a sort of guilty pleasure. (Although, these days, I don't think any pleasure should be classified as guilty, but anyway...) These were paperbacks pumped out by major romance and mainstream publishing companies. Theoretically, all of these novels were picked up by agents, sent to publishers, accepted by publishers, read by several editors, then published and deposited onto the shelves of Walmart, Target, or regular bookstores. I remember quite clearly that about a third of the books were just horrid plot lines, badly edited, and riddled with typos. Some of the books would surprise me with a halfway decent plot and a minimal amount of typos. The original mass market paperback copies that I had of Mercedes Lackey's "Arrows of the Queen" trilogy, while well edited and well written, had quite a number of copy edit typos and mistakes. This was a known issue at the time, though, and she quickly had it fixed, but still, it goes to show that human editing and publishing won't necessarily mean that a novel is "good".

Good and bad are always subjective, and this AI witch hunt and insistence on writing perfectionism really is concerning to me for several reasons:

First, this mindset is demanding certain level of perfectionism for authors, even first time authors. Their books have to be at some sort of unwritten level of what someone else's idea "good" is and no one really, truly knows what that is, nor can they meet that expectation. Again, all writing is subjective: one person's trash is another person's treasure. There are books that I absolutely detest, like William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust" (to be fair, I detest Faulkner and Hemingway and that cohort of writers on the whole), which to me is horribly written, navel gazing, drivel. There's a lot of how he writes that would have got me failing grades in my English class, and yet he's considered a bastion of American writing. Your idea of what's good or bad writing is just that: your idea. It's not AI just because you don't like it, or if it sounds stilted, or weird, or if it's prose you wouldn't personally write yourself.

Second, the Anti-AI movement has started to become weaponized, and is ripe for sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic abuse. Think about it. If someone wanted to really cause a marginalized author (queer, trans, person of color, disabled, etc) to crash and burn just because they are marginalized the easiest thing for them to do is to accuse them of writing with AI. They can fake running the author's work through one of those detectors (which aren't accurate), have it claim it wasn't human written, and their job is done. They don't even have to be publicly bigoted to do it. But, I hear folks say, if they have proof they didn't use AI, it'll be fine! Not so. This is the internet, folks. That kind of accusation sticks better than super glue. Once the accusation is made, it's over. It pops up time after time in front of people who didn't see it the first time, and because no one is allowed to redeem themselves, it doesn't go away. There is no grace, and no recovering from that.

Third, this insistence on perfection really makes things difficult for young and new writers. I see it all the time on Tumblr where new writers are asking if they can write in certain ways, or if they have to dumb down their writing so it doesn't "sound like" an AI wrote it. These new writers will turn to someplace like Reddit to get feedback, and the first few messages are "This sounds like AI!" or "I can tell you used AI for this you aren't a real writer!" No matter how much they say, or even prove, that they didn't use AI, no one on the internet will believe it.

I hope at some point this Puritanical cult-like perfectionism and AI witch hunt will eventually go away. That we can find some way to err on the side of kindness, give the benefit of the doubt, and ditch the idea that difference in style is somehow bad. Or ditch the attitude that just because we, personally, don't like something automatically means its trash. It's ok to not like a book, or to not finish a book because it's not for you. What's not ok is turning your concept of "good writing" into a weapon and destroying writers in the process. We, as writers, are doing serious damage to our community by perpetuating these ideals. Honestly, we need not be doing the facists and bigots work for them.