Writers these days are feeling a little besieged by AI. The big E-book sellers are so inundated with AI-only written books that they can’t hope to remove all of them. And everything seems to have an AI cover on it these days. Seriously, if I see one more hyper cut cheekboned, ultra square-jawed, smoldering-eyed hero on a cover, I’m going to spit my Hibiscus tea. The worst was yesterday. The cover could only be described as a 90s American Girl doll book, with a winsome, very teen-looking ingenue on the cover. It was done in a painterly style; honestly, it wasn’t at all objectionable. The girl was standing in front of a pillared mansion, still with me? Over the front door hung a banner with Greek letters— Are you starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach? The description put the nail in the coffin. Yup. The story was about a girl getting gang-banged (Their word!) and get this, it was a comedy… I get writing dark, hell, I have, um, varied tastes when it comes to reading material. It was the disconnect between the cover and the story that was so off-putting.
But that isn’t why I’m here. I have big red dots on the covers of all of my books saying that the work and cover were created by a human being, yours truly! For the Sci-fi series, that is going to be a little trickier. Because I am using AI, just not to write the book (or do the covers, but that is a different post). I’m using it to help me generate ideas and organize those ideas. I’ve never had to build a whole world from scratch before. Not like this! Every time I come up with a new plot point I feel like I need to stop and question everything. Think about it, a character says something simple like “Wait a damn minute!” Would they use ‘damn’? Okay no. Now I have to have a table of expletives. And ‘minute’? Not a chance. So now you are developing a system of time, and while you’re at it might as well add in distance, and all the other measurements you can think of because they will come up. So yeah, the lore gets deep. It is also a crazy amount of fun so… But my little ADD brain needs to store and organize it all, and I’m using AI for that. But it isn’t ever going to show up in the work, which brings me to my next problem.
I am also using Google’s Gemini as a brainstorming partner. Frankly, it isn’t great. But it also doesn’t balk when I want to ask it questions at ungodly hours. When I told this to a fellow romance writer, she said that she didn’t understand how that wasn’t writing with AI. And I guess that gave me pause. Is it? I almost never take AI’s suggestions, but it sparks new ideas for me. I’m one of those people who needs to talk through a problem. Even if it does come up with something I like, I give it a twist or tweak to make it more ‘Lisette.’
I want to know what you think. Will my Sci-Fi books still earn a big red ‘No AI’ dot?
PS. If you are looking for a shifter book with serious intimacy between a nonbinary hacker and the pack’s quartermaster (Q if you are into Bond), Uncommon Mate is out now on KU. This will be my last KU release.