A writer's rant

 Read the other day that a writer on one of Sports Illustrated's platforms got nailed for using artificial intelligence to plagiarize part of some betting piece or other, and here came my Curmudgeonly Old Writer Guy, roaring from his cave. 

I cannot help this. It's who I am. It's probably who I was at 31 instead of 71, come to think of it.

And so I shake my head and grumble and wonder what Dan Jenkins would think this. Or Frank Deford. Or Curry Kirkpatrick or Gary Smith or any of the other SI legends from back in the day.

I'm thinking they wouldn't think too kindly of it. I'm thinking they'd think, one, AI is a cheat for a writerly sort, and lazy, and, by the way, so is plagiarism. In fact if you can't come up with a better way to say something than whomever it is you're plagiarizing, you're not much of a writer and should probably take up a different profession, like arc-welding.

I think that's what the legends would think because that's what I think. Not that I was ever a legend or anything close to it.

What I am is guy who did the sportswriting thing for 40 years, and the idea of stealing someone else's words -- at least without quotation marks and attribution -- would never have occurred to me. This was arrogance, mostly; I figured I usually could express something better in my own way, so why would I bother with someone else's way?

And besides ... it's lazy, like I said. And not nearly as much fun.

As for AI, well, that's lazy squared. And if you're a writer -- the sort of oddball who glories in the written word -- you know AI can't write, anyway. This is because the human brain is infinitely more complex, and every human brain is different. We're all informed by different life experiences, and it's those life experiences that enable us to produce words and images unique to us. The associations we make are ours alone.

AI?

All AI can do is reproduce whatever you tell it to. That's why what it spits out is so wretchedly pro forma. Skynet may live, but it can't write for doody.

Or at least, that's what I tell the young minds I find myself surrounded by these days.

In my retirement, see, I've taken up teaching creative writing for an organization called the Unity Performing Arts Foundation in my hometown, and it's been a revelation. First of all, the students are mostly middle-schoolers to young high-schoolers, and I'd forgotten what kids that age are like. And, second, I'm amazed (and a bit envious at times) at how adept some of them are with the written word at their age.

And so, periodically, I haul Curmudgeonly Old Writer Guy from his cave and rant my little rant about AI. It can, I point out, be a useful tool. But it can't express your thoughts and feelings -- your creativity -- better than you can. All that is yours, and yours alone.

It's why, when I try to coax one of my shy ones to read for the class what they've written, I always say a variation of this: "Come on. Have pride in your work, because you should. It's your work, after all, and no one else's. Don't be afraid to share it."

I almost never add, "And don't ever let AI within a light year of it."

I don't have to. I mean, how many times have they heard that sermon from the old dude?