As someone with a generally positive view of technology, I like to use it in my work. However, it’s as an always as an assistant or a tool. There’s something about the human touch that I think most technological tools don’t have.
For example, my current writing process is to take a story idea and brainstorm with an LLM. I don’t have it write any lines, but I like to use it to bounce ideas off of.
In my technical work, we used to have “rubber duck debugging”. When you were stuck trying to find a bug in a program, you’d explain the problem to a rubber duck on your desk. Obviously, the duck was useless in finding solution. It was you talking through the problem that realizes its source.
That’s how I view the LLMs I use for brainstorming.
I also like to use speech-to-text on stories, to hear how they flow.
It’s been shown that people who write something will often miss errors and problems when editing. They knew what they wanted to write, and their brain assumes what is written in correct. Hearing a story points out these problems clearly.
For now, I’m experimenting with image and video generation, using AI tools. There’s still work for these tools to be the quality most of us expect, but they are improving quickly.
But, I view using any of these tools as something that augments humans – not replaces them.
You still need that creative spark, and you still need someone who has acquired taste, to separate the good from the slop.