This past week, I had the opportunity to day trip with a friend and writing mentor of mine to a wonderful bookstore in Menomonie for a book signing. Dragon Tale Bookstore has all the great features of quaint bookstores: wooden floors that creak when you walk on them, all the colorful displays of featured books with beautiful covers and of course, avid readers browsing (many of them, college kids).

While there, we visited with a UW-Stout Creative Writing professor, along with one of the bookstore owners, and had some pretty insightful looks into the world of AI and its role in the literary world. You’ve probably heard the hot topic of well-known authors coming together to try to prevent AI from writing books based on their writing styles etc and then marketing them online.

So how do you get around this when AI is here to stay?

It’s an unknown frontier, but in a simple sentence: you use it. The Creative Writing teacher has gone to conferences and is implementing it into her classes. We had asked her if it’s a problem in the higher-level writing classes, the way it’s a problem many teachers currently have in correcting high school and middle school essays that weren’t written by them, but by Artificial Intelligence. Her take was that citing fake resources has always been around, but it can be tough and time-consuming for her to check every single resource on each student’s paper and many times, the source and article is actually online, but it was never actually written by the newspaper or source it had claimed. Maybe not written at all.

Instead of trying to shut down this world-wide machine, she’s teaching future writers how to use it responsibly through writing prompts and developing characters. Give the AI a character profile and background and have an actual conversation with it to trigger backstory of characters and get some insight from a new perspective. Don’t use it to do your writing assignments or even write the novel you’ve always wanted to (no shortcuts there), but use it in other ways to support your creativity.

Interesting. Fascinating. Smart.

The conversation completely shifted my mindset, not for AI necessarily, but how it can be somewhat embraced.

Connecting with the bookstore owner, he is a really great editor/editor and has also been in the writing world since college in the 80s. He’s found great new ways to use AI, from developing great photo content for blogs to actually developing a voice to translate his blogs into podcasts, which is something I’ve wanted to do, but didn’t want to be the one to actually do it (Hello AI, let me introduce myself). Of course, when I told my teenage son about all this, he was aware of all of these things (thank you Tik-Tok).

So, we’re at the ground level of Artificial Intelligence in the Literary World. What’s next? Other than Elon Musk, noone knows, but we can all agree that it’s here to stay and that students are going to be using it. It’s a freight train that’s charging forward and won’t be stopped so why not embrace it find ways to use it, responsibly, and teach future writers to do the same.

Now, to pay my teens a fee to do this for me and make sure they give me a great Podcast voice, that’s the real challenge:)!