I am a skeptic. Admittedly. I am not the one who jumps on bandwagons or who purchases the first iterations of a product. I always stand back and wait for the reviews.

Always.

And so it is with AI. I’m waiting to find out whether or not it’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing for writers. And thus far, I’m very skeptical.

A current television commercial shows a mother using AI to illustrate a story her daughter is telling her. As it goes, the child dreams of dragons and such, and—poof—AI produces an image. It’s sweet and looks appealing.

But what’s missing is the child’s own imagination to create the visual.

One thing I have always loved about books is that books require a reader to conjure up images from the writer’s description. When I read about a creepy house, for instance, or a particularly unattractive character, I have an image in my mind. That image is an amalgamation of my own personal experiences and those of the author.

Here’s a good example. In reading Erik Larson’s recent book, The Demon of Unrest^*, I came across this gem. Describing Horace Greeley, Larson writes, “Greeley at this point was forty-nine years old, easily recognized in a crowd by his distinctly peculiar beard—a ring of gray whiskers that radiated outward from underneath his chin like a bird’s nest, a likeness further enhanced by the egg-like appearance of his bald head.”

Isn’t that great? And doesn’t that conjure up a great image. I don’t need a photograph—or AI— to show me what the man looked like.

But that’s exactly what AI is stealing. It is usurping readers’ imagination (and pleasure, I might add) to create their own images.

Add that reality to a generation who has spent their sight life absorbed in movies, television, Facebook, Instagram….all visual images….and their hearing life muffled by headphones and blaring music.

They have collectively missed the wonder of the real world. For budding writers, they’ve missed a treasury of experiences that enhance words. They have not collected the sights, sounds, smells, touches that fuel vivid imaginations.

And the advent of AI makes it more than possible they never will.

_{*From The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson, 2024, pages 86/87.}