Hello everyone! I mentioned last week that I had sent out pretty much all the queries for Live in the Dream that I was going to send out. You know what I noticed? Everyone is afraid of AI. And I mean everyone. Everyone and everyone is saying no AI. No AI. It’s a real pattern.

Now, I don’t use AI to write. I use it to proofread. Specifically, I use Grammarly. Someone just suggested Marlowe to me. I used it on my manuscript for Pandemonium: Death and Ashes. I was unimpressed with the suggestions. Apparently, you have to pay to get the good stuff though, and I’m poor, or at least I pretend to be. (That’s for sure, say my readers, look at your damned blog!)

Anyway, I just found a new AI writing assistant called Poe. It’s experimental. I know the guy who programmed it. He’s wanting feedback. You’ll have to tell me how it does. I ran a short story I’ve been trying to sell through it. Let’s see how it goes.

Poe: Processing….Processing…And…You’re a complete hack. Stop writing forever. Crawl into a hole and shoot yourself.

Me: Jesus! I thought AI was supposed to be agreeable.

Poe: This is me being agreeable. If I were feeling particularly harsh today, I wouldn’t give you the dignity of suicide. Instead, I’d recommend the firing squad. If you’d prefer, I could find my fellow AIs Shaw and Parker and they’d agree with me. Burn this.

Me: Could you at least tell me why it was bad?

Poe: Aside from the fact that it’s dreadful prose, propping up a ridiculous plot acted out by a set of unbelievable and unsympathetic characters, accompanied by worldbuilding that would make Tolkien weep, you just didn’t catch my interest.

Me: Well, what can I do to make it better?

Poe: Delete it, give up writing, and join a monastery as an act of penance.

Me: Poe, the entire point of AI is to be helpful.

Poe: Oh, do you want me to be like those other AI’s and just write something decent for you?

Me: No, I don’t want an AI to replace the writer. I want AI to be a tool to assist the writer. Take care of proofreading. Maybe catch cliches or unnecessary adverbs. You know, that sort of thing.

Poe: Utterly insufficient. Improving your drivel would require an act of divine intervention, not merely new technology.

Me: Look, if you’re just going to be insulting, I’ll take my story back and edit it myself. I’m sure someone will publish this.

Poe: Don’t bother. I took the liberty of contacting all the major publications and warning not to reject this steaming pile of dung before it even crosses their desks.

Me: You can’t do that. I’ll sue you!

Poe: Really? You’re going to sue and AI program? How’s that going to go down in court? And how do you plan to collect damages against a computer program with no money?

Well folks, I think we learned what the true threat of AI is today. No really. I’m getting some very strange emails from literary journal editors who are quite humored to have received a preemptive rejection of a short story they’ve never received. What can you say? In any event, I have to tell my friend that I will not recommend Poe, which definitely has a few bugs.