Writing

And it's easy to get terms mixed up or conflate one with another. I say that as someone who works in the biz, mostly with NLUs and some privately trained LLMs, and who still has to constantly educate myself to keep things straight. The field is changing a lot, and fast.

Software development is my day job, but I'm also a professional writer, fiction and non-fiction. I share fellow creatives' concerns about the way the big LLMs were trained and how they're being used to spew out a constant stream of drek. I'm happy there's a backlash against newsrooms who've tried to replace actual writers with GenAI.

I actually wouldn't lump Hemingway in with GenAI. It's not like ChatGPT or Sudowrite or other generative tools. It's a rules-based natural language processor, and as a writer, I don't have any ethical concerns about it at all.

I don't use generative-capable AIs to produce text. Ethical considerations aside, the text that comes out feels to me like the literary equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. Its writerly voice is just...echhhh.

But I've used ChatGPT to argue with. I try to explain my plot, it second-guesses the shit out of me, and by the time I'm done justifying my choices, I feel a helluva lot more confident about my story. It can be really useful for that.

I'm glad to hear you're finding joy in writing, FirstLight, and if Hemingway is making you feel more confident about your story, I think that's awesome and a great use of the technology.