I am a storyteller. My strength lies in the way I draw my stories from inspiration, from my heart and soul, and put them onto the page. The way I choose to word phrases, sentence length and structure, even the grammar rules I follow (Oxford Commas forever!), all of those things make up the stories I write. No computer can duplicate that.

I have a no AI statement on my website already; however, this month’s question for the Insecure Writers Support Group blog asks Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?

The answer to all of that is no. I don’t use AI. It is atrocious for the environment first of all, and while it’s true that no individual can reduce their carbon footprint enough to compensate for corporations, we can make a choice not to use something that’s so egregious for the environment and contributes substantially to climate change. That’s within our power. So I don’t use AI.

I tried it once for writing a few marketing social media posts for another project, and you know what? Those posts sounded like every other marketing post written by a “marketing bro” and didn’t reflect my personality or me. Authenticity wins. If you use AI, you’re not being authentic.

Now, I want to make it clear that tools like text-to-speech and other accessibility features are not what I’m talking about here. I think a lot of people are trying to paint accessibility features with the same broad paintbrush as LLM/AI generated text out of whole cloth to disability-wash the entire industry. I think platforms and people that do this are being disingenuous.

As a neurospicy person who is big into neurodivergent and autistic liberation, I also think the advice to run what you say through a LLM/AI to “make it sound better” is also not good. Authenticity matters. And if someone can’t/won’t accept you being your authentic self, that’s their problem–not yours. And if you have to mask, because yes, using LLM/AI to rewrite what you say is masking, to get a job or make someone feel better about working with you, are they really worth it in the long run? Because they’re not going to accept you if you don’t mask (aka bend over backwards) to make them happy. (And yes, I get it. I work in an abusive job at the moment and trying to find a new one is tough as hell. But I also won’t mask, because guess what? I’ve been there, and it doesn’t end pretty for the neurodivergent person.)

Finally, most LLMs/AI are trained on people’s work. We don’t know what biases go into it, except we do know that copyright material does. I haven’t plagarized and I won’t start now by using AI/LLMs.

I’m a storyteller. My stories come from my heart and soul, not some computer chip somewhere written by people who don’t give a damn about me and mine.