To be clear, I do not condone AI generated writing, and those who use it to pass off work as their own aren't writers. They're thieves. But because of those few, please don't make the rest of us pay the price. Has it ever crossed your mind how ridiculous it is that AI was trained on human writing, and is now being used to flag writing that resembles what it was trained on, which is human writing? And sure, there are telltale signs of AI writing patterns, but is that really a true measurement of detecting AI, especially when those telltale signs came from human writing to begin with?
I don't have all the answers, as much as I wish I did, but for me the truest measure is whether I can feel human emotions in what I'm reading. Take Kim Eun-sook, one of the writers I admire with all my heart. If you're not familiar with her, she wrote the world famous Korean dramas like Mr. Sunshine, Lovers in Paris, and Descendants of the Sun. There's a scene in Mr. Sunshine where three male characters share a drink and walk home under cherry blossom trees. One of them jokes about killing the one walking next to him, and the other replies with a line that's difficult to translate into English: "If I die right now, it's hwa-sa." "Hwa" means flower and "sa" means death, so together it refers to flowers that have died and fallen from the trees. But "hwa-sa" also means beautiful. So in that single line, he's saying that dying among fallen flowers would be beautiful. And later in the story, that's exactly what happens. He dies protecting the woman he loves, and to him, there was no more beautiful way to go. That single sentence made my heart tingle and ache all at once. AI, even in its most advanced form, will never be able to write anything remotely close to something that makes you feel that.
For the longest time I believed she must be a genius. But in one interview, she said she doesn't believe she is. She writes 12 hours a day, every day, obsessively, because she believes that's the only way she can write well. Kim Eun-hee, another writer I adore, who wrote Signal and Kingdom, said something similar. She stays up all night thinking, and only when the sun is about to rise do ideas begin to form. Even she, someone who wrote pure masterpieces, lives with a constant fear that one day she might not be able to write anymore, and to shake that off, she works harder than anyone else. And as a result, they write something that makes people cry and laugh, that lifts them when they're down and gives them hope when they have none.
Blindly hating and boycotting AI won't make it go away because it's here to stay, and most likely here for good. If you really want to fight for creative work, the first step is to acknowledge that AI is just a tool and to learn and educate others on how to use it right. And as a writer, it would really help if readers didn't jump to conclusions and accuse writers of AI usage because they used an em dash, or because they used the word "tapestry" here and there, or because they wrote with metaphors and flowery sentences. If you read something and feel something real, something human, please give it the benefit of the doubt that human hard work is behind it. I pray from the bottom of my heart that writers thrive and never stop using their imagination to create beautiful stories, because I'm a firm believer that words are powerfully magical. Long live the human story that moves people.