Worth the Fight
Want to do something together?
From an older version of my brain, to yours.
Yep, I’m talking about “AI”* again.
*Why the quotation marks? Because tools such as chatGPT or Google Gemini are not actually intelligent. They use algorithms to trawl huge amounts of data in a very short amount of time, to recombine that data to match the queries put to them. The results are statistical analyses that find the average data spread for a given query, using words rather than numbers. What’s actually artificial is the hype.
I've been fighting a stubborn feeling of honestly-what’s-the-point lately. I’m certain I’m not alone. When I was in the thick of the auction, I heard from a lot of people that they were grateful for a meaningful way to take action.
So in this month’s Musings, I’m tackling this annoyingly persistent feeling of disempowerment head-on by doing something I hope is useful. I’m sharing some resources about “AI,” and making two requests of you, my small and mighty band of faithful readers.
I get the feeling that most people outside of the writing community (or the tech or finance/stocks or climate action or education communities) don’t really talk much about “AI.” Specifically, what it is, what it isn’t, or its ongoing and threatening environmental impacts. But we need everyone talking and thinking and discussing it because it has serious material repercussions for our lives, our society and culture, and our many and varied communities.
I’ve been building my personal knowledge bank of “AI”-related articles and essays for a few years now. Many are focussed on the publishing industry and copyright, but I also do my best to read on the overall trends, analyses, and impacts on everyone. I’ve chosen the list below as a sample of what’s available to us all. I’ve checked that these are credible sources, too.
Request #1: Please take the time and mental space to read and intellectually engage with the following resources:
A May 2025 Teen Vogue op-ed focussed on the environmental impacts of the data centres which power “AI.” It includes many other credible sources, which I encourage you to also read (if you haven’t already), as well as responses to the op-ed itself from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
A primer by the acclaimed American writer and intellectual Ted Chiang, explaining what Large Language Models are—and are not. From 2023. This piece is why I often refer to LLMs / “AI” as glorified copiers.
Another May 2025 story, about current integration efforts in the food industry, in South Korea.Maybe a peek into a possible near-future? This piece includes both the benefits to employers and anecdotal downsides to workers. That dichotomy, in my opinion, is important to keep in mind when we read about why “AI” automation is the so-called inevitable great future. Great for whom? And are there supports in place for those who get left behind? If we’re truly in this together, it means we have to be mindful of, and care for, the most vulnerable among us. Shouldn’t that be the measure of our success as a society?
Speaking of human workers, this piece from April 2024 does a good job of situating “AI” in the decades-long ongoing conversation about outsourcing labour and its complex, often problematic, results. I dunno about you, but I don’t want to ignore—let alone support—the traumatic exploitation of human beings. Colonialism and its harmful legacies are very much in the room with us when we don’t interrogate tech that depends on the argument that ‘foreign workers are cheaper.’
I’ll leave off adding yet another piece on the awfulness of “AI” writing or “AI” drawing. You already know my stance: that machine learning cannot replace the humanity at the core of the arts. Instead, I’ll share this new Guardian piece on how one of the most ubiquitous apps in the reading world wants to displace human creative workers aka artists.
These links are a tiny percentage of what I could list. Articles about the targeted weaponization of “AI” (eg., deepfake videos, images, and revenge pornography; false news stories; ) which spread harmful disinformation and misinformation, and which can incite stochastic terrorism, usually aimed at vulnerable marginalized people. Articles about the dangers to our privacy when “AI” replaces civil servants and public service/government systems. Alarming stories about “AI” therapy bots urging teens to self-harm or, heartbreakingly, to suicide. In-depth journalism about where tech corporations build their “AI” data centres and how surrounding residents end up paying, through their taxes, for those centres to suck up already-scarce water and energy resources which those same residents have to go without.
As it is, what I’ve shared above is a lot. Please take your time, but please do read them.
Request #2: Please do at least one of the following things:
Add “-AI” to the end of your searches (after a space). This circumvents “AI” generated search results, which means you don’t contribute to data centres inequitably devouring natural resources. If we all do this, it makes a difference. (Consider how often in just one day you use a search engine.) The fun version is to add a curse word to your search terms. The f-bomb and its many iterations work well. Just sayin’.
Please stop using chatGPT or similar LLM-bots, even to dunk on its shite output. (Or, don’t start at all.) Current LLMs are all trained on stolen data. Like millions of other authors, some of my books have been hoovered up into those training data sets, completely without my consent or knowledge at the time. If given a choice, I would have 1000% said No. Moving forward, I will never sign onto licensing my works for LLM training, either. Plus: Imagine one small bottle of water; imagine uncapping it and pouring all 519mL of that precious water out onto the floor—all for one measly 100-word email created using chatGPT-4. In the face of our climate crisis, that seems…irresponsible to say the least.
Please opt out of the “AI” that seems to be forced into every app we use, whether we want them or not, whether they have any utility for us or not. I actively opt out or turn off the “AI” tools in Canva, gmail, Adobe Acrobat/Reader, MS Word, my iPhone, Google docs/sheets etc., and anything else I come across. Again, if we all do this, it can make a difference.
The smartest PR move the early tech peddlers of “AI” made was to use the term artificial intelligence for their LLMs. Fed on decades of excellent (and not so excellent) scifi stories of time-travelling cyborgs and sentient space ships and roboticized dystopian futures, the media and public latched onto that familiar and tantalizing term. The problem, though, is it gives the industry a veneer of sophistication that’s wholly undeserved at best, and depressingly harmful at worst.
TL;DR LLMs can’t think or reason, and they certainly cannot understand anything about the human experience. They can only repeat what’s been fed into them. Human beings can do so. much. better. Because we reason, we feel, and we can empathize.
If you've read this far, I thank you, truly. The last few Musings seem to’ve lost me subscribers. Was it something I said, specifically about trans rights..? I’ll never know. Point being, I’m grateful for those who are open to what I have to say, and to what I choose to advocate for.
This time around, I’m asking you to do something(s) to fight against the manufactured narrative of “inevitability” which “AI” boosters love to cite to justify inserting unnecessary tech into our lives sans our consent, and which media stories love to regurgitate without critical thought. It does not have to happen. We do not need to acquiesce, and especially not in advance.
My requests to you are a place to start, before we run out of time to do anything about it at all.
And now for something a little lighter
As promised, with many thanks to Annette Wierstra, SMOOCH Director and friend, to whom I send a heartfelt Happy Belated Birthday! *heart eyes*
Have a listen at your leisure to my latest appearances on the Agents of SMOOCH podcast:
If You Had Five Daughters aka Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Always Be The Colonel Brandon aka Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Bonus: Emma Thompson’s (mostly) delightful 1996 Golden Globes acceptance speech at winning Best Screenplay. The dated hairstyles! The orangey-red lipsticks! The witty homage! Content note: There’s a microaggression aimed at the film’s director, Ang Lee. We touch on it during our podcast discussion.
In Other News
My upcoming online Plotting Characters workshop for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association on Sunday June 8th at 1:00 PM ET is free! Click through here for more details and to register. Registration is open until June 6th. I can promise you’ll work hard and have fun.
As of now, the local authors book sale on Saturday July 5th, hosted by Edmonton Public Library Writer-in-Residence Rhonda Parrish is still tentative, but I really hope to confirm more soon. I haven’t seen local author friends in person in forever! Rhonda and I used to meet monthly, too, along with our friend Eileen Bell. We usually met at a Japanese restaurant and caught up for hours. I miss those pre-covid days, I truly do.
The edit letter for the suspense novel I turned in last month literally just dropped into my inbox this morning eeeeeee! I haven’t peeked at it yet (ikr? Discipline!) but I’ll have more to say next Musings.
Oh, there’s just one more thing...
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