My debut novel Hell or Hangover is available for purchase (e-book or paperback) on Amazon! If you haven’t yet, order a copy!
Here’s what the great and powerful had to say about the book…
Simple and to the point.
If you’ve read Hell or Hangover and enjoyed it please consider leaving an Amazon or Goodreads review. Onto the show…
After writing the title of this piece I feel like I am holding a tiki torch. I assure you I am not penning this in a white robe with a white pointy hat with holes cut out in the eyes. That’s because my robe is black and my hat is fitted. But I do have the same crazy conviction of one of those racist, antisemitic, replacement theory wackos after a recent experience with AI writing. But first, I have to come clean.
I am a software engineer. I work with AI software and some of that software is made in house. I am the pusher. The dope peddler. The salesman. The person who convinces a company that if they purchase our AI tools they will be more efficient and their business will be better for it. And you know what? I’m not lying.
You see, people are talking about AI all wrong. They have a couple conversations with ChatGPT and think, my God, this is the end of us (us being writers). They test out the tool by typing in a prompt for a story and get something back that actually reads like a story and think I’m toast. But this is not the way.
The real way AI is going to change our world is through the replacement of menial tasks. Most of the people who constantly babble about AI have no experience in the real business world. They don’t understand how small to large businesses actually operate. They’ve been writing all their life, all they do is read and think and regurgitate, and they’ve never actually been an employee of a small business. They do not understand that when a company gets, let’s say, an invoice from a vendor, that some human has to sit there and type that invoice into the computer. An employee has to compile the invoices, then they have to go to their computer and open up their accounting software, they select a customer from a dropdown list, select the correct payment terms, type in the products that were purchased, type in the price of said products, make sure the total in the system matches the invoice, write any notes from the invoice and on and on the task goes. This is fine for an invoice here or there but imagine a manufacturing company. They are constantly buying material that go into the products that they produce, and the invoices are endless. Simply entering invoices into the computer is a full-time job and I am sorry to say this full-time job will no longer be necessary. AI can and will do all the above tasks.
But when it comes to creative writing, I assure you, we are fucking fine. Nothing can replace the creativity of the human mind. In NO world could AI write Hell or Hangover because AI wouldn’t know the first thing about how to combine a young man’s lust, dread, anger, love, and wittiness with the search for a girl that has disappeared through the streets of Hoboken, Manhattan, to a Babalawo, and to the brink of insanity through drink and drugs with the same expertise that I can. It is just not possible. There are plenty of reasons why it is not possible. For example, AI has never done cocaine. This is not an admission of guilt (wink, wink) but it is simply stating that AI did not go through a decade of complete and utter debauchery and lived to tell the tale. AI has never felt and therefore it can never truly convey feelings. It can fake it, sure, but it can’t feel it. When you read Hell or Hangover you’ll know the character was written by a human because the character is human.
But this piece isn’t to convince you to buy and read my book (yes it is), it is to relay an experience I recently had with AI writing and to assure you, yes you, that your writing will not be replaced by AI.
Let’s begin…
My mother bought my daughter a book. The book is called [Daughter’s] Day in Dinosaur Land. I put [Daughter’s] in brackets because this is actually my daughter’s name. The entire book is geared to my kid. Her name is riddled throughout the book. And the book was “written” by a company called EpicTales.ai. The way this works is you pick a book the kid will be interested in and then you select the option to personalize it. You select the gender, they only give you two options here (gasp!), you type in the kid’s name, and then you select the kid’s hair color, eye color, etc… so the main character resembles your own kid. Then AI does the rest.
So let’s take a trip to Dinosaur Land together shall we, and see what AI has come up with…
(Anytime I use [Daughter] read with your name)
Pg. 1 - [Daughter] found a rock, shiny and round. She held it tight and then she found…
So far, so good.
Pg. 2 - [Daughter] arrives in a land, splendidly grand. Dinosaurs everywhere, roaming the sand.
Okay, AI, let me stop you there. Was the shiny and round rock magic? Were we supposed to know that simply by holding this rock we would be sent to Dinosaur Land? I am all for brevity and the old Hemmingway glacier method of writing but Jesus Christ. No backstory, no lead up, no nothing. One minute we’re holding a shiny rock and the next were surrounded by Dinosaurs. This is brutal story telling. And since when did Dinosaurs live on sand? One search using AI (haha!) and you’d know that most deserts in modern times were once lush jungles. These fuckers can’t even use their own tools to fact check themselves.
Pg. 3 - [Daughter] meets a Triceratops, with three horns. “Count them with me,” she says with glee.
Already we are out of our end rhyming pattern. The first two pages rhyme at the end and this one goes off the reservation into a new rhyming scheme. Disgusting to the eyes but even more disgusting when I am getting in a nice reading flow with the kiddo. At this point I want to close the book and start a new one. But [Daughter] urges me onward.
Pg. 4 - Stegosaurus next, plates so tall. “Let’s color,” says [Daughter], “one and all.”
What does a stegosaurus’s plates being tall have to do with coloring? All I ask in a story is to stay true to itself. Maybe this is AI’s take on magical realism, but I still can’t find the connection between a stegosaurus’s tall plates and coloring. The worst part about this page is that the words say coloring, but the picture is of a young girl holding a dripping paint brush. If you are a parent, you know there is a HUGE difference between letting your kid color with crayons and letting them paint. That difference is the mess.
Pg. 5 - Then [Daughter] hears a T-Rex’s roar. Together they roar, a mighty outpour.
This was the page that broke my brain and also made my daughter roar so loud that she woke up her baby sister. Thanks a-fucking-lot AI. But seriously, how are we going to use roar twice there? Couldn’t we have come up with something else? AI, you sound like 2 Chainz – “She got a big booty, so I call her big booty.” Now that’s poetry.
I am now going to skip ahead to some of my favorite and most disastrous pages in order to not get sued for copyright infringement by relaying the entire story here. Wouldn’t want AI up my ass claiming that they own the rights to the words they didn’t write because they are not human and don’t own the rights to the words that they stole from other people. But I digress…
Pg. 7 - A Velociraptor dashes, fast and sleek. [Daughter] claps fast, a fun game of peak.
Peak? It’s peek, you dumb ass computer. And I’m not sure when clapping or clapping fast was ever involved in playing “peek” aka peekaboo. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. If you’ve never played peekaboo with a kid then you’re probably on an FBI watchlist, which is also why you are probably reading my Substack, but I’ll explain the game. It’s simple. You put your hands over your eyes, then you remove your hands from your eyes and yell “peekaboo”. Kids eat that shit up. No clapping involved. Maybe AI meant to write a fun game of hide and seek. That would make more sense except when you are playing hide and seek the last thing you want to do is start clapping.
Pg. 10 - Parasaurolophus calls, echoing sound. [Daughter] echoes back, their voices rebound.
First of all, can we get some pronounceable dinosaurs in this bitch? For fucks sake AI, at least put in parentheses with how to say this name out loud. My daughter looks at me like the idiot I am every time I try and pronounce this dinosaur. And how does one echo back? Is this sound screamed, yelled, roared? These are questions left unanswered.
Pg. 16 - Time to leave, [Daughter] waves goodbye. “See you soon,” she says, trying not to cry.
Fuck you AI. Straight up. You’re really going to throw a line in to a bedtime story that is based off a character with my daughter’s name that she’s trying not to cry as the book comes to an end? My daughter’s eyes have now welled up with tears. She’s now trying not to cry. She’s taking the book as literal as those freaks with tiki torches take the bible (well, kind of). The only difference is she’s three. AI clearly has never been a parent because they would know that bedtime is precarious. A kid’s brain is mush by the end of the day. They are already on edge and whether they end the day crying or laughing or actually going to sleep is anyone’s guess. But thanks for forcing the issue you stupid fucking computer. Now my daughter is crying and yelling and does not want to go to bed, she wants to go back to Dinosaur Land.
The fact that my daughter enjoys this book should not dilute the message. This book sucks and I’d much rather read Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess or Maurice Sendak or Roald Dahl (even though he was supposedly a tiki torch kind of guy) and you know what, so would my daughter. More often than not, when I ask her to pick a book out to read, she picks one written by a human. And that’s the way it should be. Writers of the world, I hope you have taken this lesson to heart. If AI can’t get a simple kids book right, how is it going to write the next Great American Novel?
P.S. – Are people really intimidated by tiki torches? Those things can’t even do what’s advertised…keep bugs away.
P.P.S – Write your best kid dino story lines here and prove you can outdo this slop.
P.P.P.S. – I am actually writing this in a black robe and fitted hat.
Dino buddy book with kid and stegosaurus who time travel and learn history.
If you’re wondering if this is a cheap knock off idea from Bill & Ted’s you would be correct.
I’m just pissed you outed Two Chainz. I liked his extra focus on the booty. Thought it was real.
Crazy thing about this AI book is load up the prompts and good luck with the output. Kind of like Instacart tips. You pay your money ahead of time and if you end up getting butterscotch instead of caramel and bruised bananas, oh well, AI book is like, go write your own damn book then.
Sounds like a good idea.