My pledge to you is that I shall never use generative AI, large-language models, or any other machine-created content, in whole or in part, in any of my books, ever.
My books are entirely written by me, Mark William Chase, a human being. The only computer-assisted functionality that aids my writing are spell checkers and grammar checkers which have existed in word processors for decades.
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, the threat posed to all creative-types has never been greater. Writers, poets, illustrators, voice actors, composers, musicians, and artists of all kinds now face a truly existential crisis. AI was supposed to make drudge work easier. It was never supposed to co-opt human creativity.
But here we are, living in a world flooded by machine-generated images, machine-generated articles, machine-generated stories, machine-generated voices, and machine-generated videos. Amazon is flooded with AI-generated books, Audible is choked with AI-narrated audiobooks, and social media abounds with AI-generated images. Marketing firms, game companies, and streaming/movie studios are all beginning to embrace AI-generated content, leaving human talent to diminish by the wayside.
LLMs and other generative AI model steal from human authors and illustrators, copying books and illustrations into their massive data sets to spew out new content derived from those stolen works. While derived works are “technical” fair use, the flagrant theft of those works from pirate websites or shameless internet scraping is theft. Thus, those who use LLMs and other generative AI model are a party to intellectual property theft.
As of this writing, it is still easy to distinguish AI created slop from authentic, humans-made art and writing. But with every passing month, the LLMs get better. At the current rate of progress, there will soon come a point where machine-generated content is indistinguishable from human-made content.
Unfortunately, there is little we can do to fight back. The genie is out of the bottle, and the rapid acceleration toward the technological singularity now seems inevitable. The only thing we as creatives can do is educate and inform, and make our solemn pledge to remain true to human creativity endeavors.
My Pledge to You
So this is my pledge, and I hope others will take this pledge as well:
I, Mark William Chase, do solemnly pledge to never use generative AI in any form in any of my works.
- I shall never create any book using AI (GAI, LLMs, or by whatever terminology) or put any such content in my books or writings.
- I shall never use covers or other illustrations created in whole or in part using AI image generators. This includes stock imagery or digital assets created by AI. Any cover artist or illustrator I hire must swear the same, and demonstrate to me that their cover or illustration is entirely human-created (whether drawn by hand or in an illustrator tool such as Photoshop), or have a solid, community-backed reputation.
- I shall never use AI generated narration in any of my audiobooks. All of my audiobooks will be narrated by a human narrator.
- I shall never use AI generated music. If I ever have need for music, I will hire a human musician who can demonstrated that they do not use AI.
- I shall have my books validated or registered in some kind of human-authored registry. Currently, the Author’s Guild has just such a registry, and my books are currently registered there. If a better registry or validation service becomes available, I will look into using one of those.
We must all stand together against the polluted tide of AI-generated garbage that is flooding every nook and cranny of our world.
Please, support human authors, human poets, human illustrators, human voice talent, human actors, human musicians, human singers, and human creatives of any other sort. Shun all AI generated content, and spread the word to support only human artistic and creative endeavors.
Thank you.
Mark William Chase
