I hate to admit I’ve used AI to do anything when there are authors who are using AI to write entire books. I can guarantee you I have way too much ego to do that. By that, I mean that I value my own writing voice too much to sanitize it with a whitewashed tone. I will also continue hiring a real artist to create my book covers, my friend Clorinda Fresquez-Tria. I also will continue to hire an editor who has a human brain and can make sense or not make sense of writing that comes from a real human mind. In the future, I plan to hire real voice actors to narrate my books for audio. Right now, I can’t afford it. Someday, I will be able to and until that time, I refuse to cut corners and create AI audiobooks. I hate AI vocal timbers. The closer they come to real human voices, the worse they are. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure, because companies are using AI voices for their ads on YouTube videos and they are as annoying as heck.
However, AI is really great at scanning my own human-written 120,000 work novel and summarizing it. You can read the blurb it came up with here. Last week, I was equally inspired to use AI to create my characters. This is where my misadventures with AI came in.
As I created images, the AI program learned to develop blocks that wouldn’t allow me to ask for certain parameters. For example, I was allowed initially to specify ethnicities such as “Polish priest” or “Mexican delivery driver.” I even got away with asking AI to make my Mexican character look more indigenous Mexican rather than Spanish. Oh, boy. Then, it gave me a speech about not using ethnic stereotypes in images when I asked it to create the Irish secretary. It was the word “Irish” it didn’t like. Okay. It suggested, instead, that I use descriptors like “red hair and freckles.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that an Irish stereotype? Once that block appeared, I couldn’t get away with using any ethnic descriptors and had to get really cagey with how I was asking it to create people: “maintenance man from the Southwest” or “electrical engineer at a norteño party in the Southwest.”
When I wanted my electrical engineer to be in his backyard holding his child to denote that he works from home and has children, it eventually developed a block that wouldn’t allow me to request an adult and a child in an image together, even though I was asking only for innocent images. It told me I could have a picture of a child alone in a yard or an adult alone in a yard, but not both together. Naturally, I asked it if it thought it was better for a child to be left unsupervised in a yard, and it told me it could not make moral statements about leaving children alone, only that it couldn’t get around the block that didn’t allow it to create an image of an adult with a child in the same image.
The next block I came across was regarding age. It had made my nineteen-year-old character look about thirty, so I asked it to make him a few years younger. My character suddenly became ten. I asked it to make him look nineteen again, and it developed a block that claimed that it couldn’t assume traits or features based on age, despite that there is actual science behind age progression. Sigh. AI is a hassle, but it became a weird obsession for me last week. See what you think of how I did getting around the blocks and describing my characters.
Jill Domschot 