Great interview. I liked the discussion on technology, the tension of being creative, the importance of consistency and more. Appreciate you posting this.
Interesting discussion and I will navigate immediately to Tim’s patch the moment I’ve posted this. Have you come across JE Petersen (Dispatches from inner space) - I don’t seem to be able to link to his Substack but he has been doing a lot of thinking/writing about the distraction of modern technology.
Thanks, Jacqueline. I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I'll go and take a look at JE Petersen's Substack - it sounds like we might have a lot in common!
Very enjoyable conversation. It nicely demonstrates that there are many ways to approach writing and we need to find the one that works for us. And there really isn’t one-size-fits-all “how to write.”
Exactly. I think that, above all, was why Simon and I were excited to put our heads together - it struck us that while we both write speculative fiction we do so in such different ways. I think our conversation illustrates that well. All you can do is keep experimenting to see what works for you (and in the process get to know yourself in a deeper way)
I think that distinction you make, Simon, between 'distraction platforms' and useful tools is such a salient one and it would serve us well to keep it in mind
I think it's partly what separates pre-2010 internet and post-2010 internet. I mean, the internet has always been full of silly, distracting things, but it wasn't designed specifically for that purpose by cynical corporations. The silly stuff back then was all community-led, and the rest was useful and interesting.
I've only really identified this way of looking at it recently, I think. It's only in retrospect I've properly noticed it.
Absolutely fascinating conversation on a topic that I'm considering as deeply as I can these days, that is whenever I'm actually inhabiting the mundane earth.
I'd like a definitive "do-this" answer, but like all bloody real things it apparently has nuance, so that's where we are now. Lost in the weeds of nuance.
The lack of a definitive "here's how you do it" is endlessly frustrating, but that's life, I suppose. Literally. Glad you enjoyed the conversation even if we had more questions than answers!
This was such a good talk between two authors at the opposite ends of the publishing spectrum, one fully embracing the tech writing life, the other going analogue to be able to write.
I’m also reflecting on MidJourney a lot as I’m using it for visuals for my publication but growing more and more disenchanted with it. Like you say, Simon, they are hollow. Not sure how to replace them for my writing without spending money I don’t earn yet. But it’s becoming a necessity, and to some point a question of identity. We’ll see how this unfolds.
A lot of writers on Substack openly use AI for illustrations, isn't it a tad harsh of you to judge and avoid those writers? It's not an ethical or moral judgement, it's an arbitrary decision.
If this was the start of the printing press, you would have taken a stand against the mass distribution of written material?
There's a vast number of writers on Substack alone, without even thinking about all the OTHER high quality reading I could be doing from other sources. We all have to prioritise what we read, based on often fairly arbitrary decisions. I don't tend to read romance novels with bare-chested muscle men on the front, for example: there might be a superb book behind that cover, but that's a decision I've made.
If a writer uses AI illustrations , and puts them front-and-centre, it's doing a similar thing. The writing could be fantastic, but in a world of infinite stuff to read I have to make some choices. And if it's a choice between a superb piece of writing with an AI illustration and a superb piece of writing without an AI illustration, I'll naturally gravitate towards the latter.
As I noted in the conversation, when it comes to other people's work it's not so much that I'm making an ethical or moral judgement against them. It's more that I find AI art aesthetically and artistically a bit boring. Someone else is free to use those tools, sure, but I can't *not* have that reaction.
I don't quite follow the analogy to the printing press, and mass distribution of written material.
I don't think genre preferences are the equivalent of judgemental decisions.
Lots of Substacks have crappy headers or page layouts, that is, aesthetically displeasing to me, I don't judge the writer for focusing on their words not my visual preferences.
Some day AI will likely help provide you with a diagnosis or successful medical treatment, or help avert a pandemic, or reduce and prevent crime, to offer a few obvious examples amongst thousands.
A recent study found that most people (being nearly everyone) couldn't correctly pick a real human face from the AI generated - most often identifying AI as the real face. Such is the aesthetic advancement of AI.
If someone is paying an artist for illustrations, as a personal statement, that's great, but I can't think of any reason why I would reject exploring a writer for making use of a ubiquitous tool to enhance their work with illustrations.
Without wanting to get into semantics, how do you differentiate 'genre preferences' and 'judgemental decisions'? Aren't they the same thing, in this context?
My point was that if the romance novel had a less cheesy cover, I could well have ended up reading it. Presentation does matter, even if it shouldn't, really, when the words are the main thing.
It's the same with an illustration on a Substack newsletter: if I don't see the illustration, I'll just enjoy the words: but if there's a generic AI image used in the social preview, or stuck prominently at the top of the article for no particular reason, it might prompt some eyebrow raising from me. The question, I suppose, is: what is the image contributing to the article? You ask, quite reasonably, "why I would reject exploring a writer for making use of a ubiquitous tool to enhance their work with illustrations" - my query, I think, is to ask how the tool is *enhancing* the work. In what way is it enhanced by the AI image? If you remove the AI image, is the text made worse or 'un'-enhanced somehow?
MEANWHILE: AI that is used in data analysis, medicine and so on is a very different thing to generative AI used to create images and text. I've read about many incredible use cases in medicine, archaeology and so on. Even if the tech has similar roots, I don't really see it as the same thing. Although the article doesn't go into any detail, this is very cool, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/26/cancer-mrna-vaccine-melanoma-trial
I'm not sure how relevant the point is about most people not being able to distinguish AI from real images. *Most* people can't do *most* things. :) Some people can and do, though. Most people not noticing an AI image doesn't change the fact that I *do* tend to notice. :)
It's also worth noting that I'm primarily talking about the worst/most basic uses of AI images. There are certainly ways to generate more interesting visuals with AI, if you know what you're doing. And if AI components are used as a part of a larger project, you can end up with interesting results. But if someone types in a prompt, grabs the first image, and shoves it into their blog...I don't think that's doing them or their work any favours.
All of this is just my opinion, though: if someone wants to use AI, that's their choice. It's also my choice to de-prioritise that work on my very long reading list.
(the one caveat here is that all of this is without touching upon the ongoing grey area around copyright, permissions, legality and so on, which is a whole other kettle of fish and much more problematic than the aesthetic/preference stuff we've been discussing)
I wasn't really thinking about tacky book covers, even though that's the example you gave.
A year ago I could identify every AI face. Last week, doing the same test used in the study, my score was around 30% correct, still quite a bit better than most students who participated in the study. (There was a sample size, the 'most people' referred only to that sample of people, and only to this task, not to whether or not they could be theoretical physicists or astronauts). This relates solely to your point about aesthetics. AI images are taking on a less distinctly AI aesthetic than a mere year ago.
Some people use an image purely for presenting colour and interest to the top of their newsletter - all those coffee cups and note books don't create themselves. 😂
Others use images to enhance the written experience. Nathan Slake dies this well, for example, as do many others.
An illustration is a glance, while a genre is something someone is going to spend quite a bit of time with, taking up space in their mind for an extended experience. No one keeps flipping back to a book cover or illustration to validate their reading choices.
You've made fleeting AI illustrations a blunt culling tool, which genuinely puzzled me, I was curious to understand why. We all have culling criteria, usually quite specific to our experience, education, taste, reading motivations, etc, and especially for newsletters (choosing books ito read is a whole lot easier). So much to read, so little time, we're all in the same boat.
Students learn about art by looking at art, copyright works, and learn to do art by mimicking original art. LLMs do the same. The difference is thin.
I've not been able to get the vapours about the issue. Maybe legal cases will say otherwise, in due course. It's still early days. I merely watch with interest.
I just don't like the look of a lot of 2023/24-era AI art. I don't know what else I can say to explain myself. :D If other people are fine with that stuff, then that's fine. I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do or not do.
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that corporations scraping vast quantities of copyrighted material in order to make money off selling consumers a software tool is even vaguely the same as students and artists learning from one another. I don't think the difference is thin *at all* (though the AI industry would definitely like us all to think so).
When a student studies an old master, or even just a peer, that learning is directly filtered through the student's human brain. There is intent there, and conscious thought, and meaning. There is, fundamentally, a perspective. And it's all of that weirdness and uniqueness which transforms the studied work into something new, and lifts it above simply being a clone or a derivative work. That's real progress.
An AI doesn't bring a new perspective, or intent, because it can't. That's not how they function. It's absorbing everyone's work, sure, but it isn't learning, or adding anything new to the mix. Anthropomorphising AIs and comparing them to human learning is a bit of a distraction, I think.
A basic AI image tells me nothing about the writer or their work. The only statement it can make is that they used generative AI.
Hundreds of millions of people still use FB or some other social media platform to keep in touch with family and friends. It's always curious that so many people, these days, take pride in denigrating social media, and FB in particular, as a trite distraction, even though most people don't actually use the platforms in that manner, and contrary to hysterical reports.
I loved FB when it launched, because that's precisely what it did - and it was REALLY good at it!
I logged in just now and finding anything from my friends requires wading past weird adverts, irritating short videos (which are not made by my friends) and other random stuff that's designed to grab my attention. (it doesn't help that due to my day job, my notifications are full of client stuff - Meta's insistence on blending work and personal is another thing I dislike. In fact, having to work with Meta systems is a direct factor: the last thing I want to do is have to wrestle with them when I'm not working)
I stopped using Facebook a few years back because I realised I wasn't getting anything useful or entertaining from it. I communicate with friends via WhatsApp and other chat systems which are far less busy. If Facebook was still the core 'communicate with friends' platform it started out as, I'd still be using it. But that's not what Meta design it to be these days. I stuck with Twitter for longer because I was still finding really interesting and useful links and resources there, until 2022 when that imploded.
If these things still work for other people, that's great! It doesn't work for me, though. At best Facebook does nothing of interest for me, at worst it actively distracts me from what I should be doing.
All fair points. I've spent enough time, over years, not daily or even weekly, filtering ads, videos, etc, that I mostly only see relevant content, same with other social media, of which I use rarely, but feel compelled to filter when I do, so that content becomes more relevant. It's easy to be more sanguine about social media if you self tailor it, I think. Plus I've never been a compulsive user, my bordem threshold for trivia and the asinine is low.
Same with Notes, it doesn't hold my attention for long these days.
Although I can never pass up on the Crap Bird Photography FB page.
Hi Richard. I got my publisher the old fashioned way: I sent samples of my first finished manuscript to literary agents, and was lucky enough to win representation. My agent then approached publishers and found a home for my stories. Until I'd finished my trilogy of novels I'd never done any online writing. But I've finally admitted that it's no good living in the Dark Ages if I want people to discover my books, so I started my newsletter and am trying to embrace self-promotion. To my surprise, I'm enjoying it a great deal - especially linking up with people here on Substack!
Possibly, things have changed since you became a book author. Or the USA is different from GB. Because I have now entered that wilderness called no agent, and believe me, it's dark and lonely.
We have similar backgrounds in that both of us publish in magazines. So I got a good one for ya. As you know editors are also writers, penning content for their own publications. That's why they love us-- less work to do : ) Anyway, in desperation I contacted two of the bigger mags and asked the editors if they knew any agents. Know what both said? They're looking for agents too! : )
Yes, I believe you're right - it took me a long time to finish my series of books, and in the meantime publishing has changed massively! And rapid change is destabilizing for everybody - we're all looking for solid ground amid the shifting sands. 'Dark and lonely' is, I think, a feeling almost every writer can relate to at one time or another. But there are also ways to find the bright spots, and to keep enjoying what we're doing, and that's perhaps the most important part of the practice...
Fascinating. Thanks to both of you.
Great interview. I liked the discussion on technology, the tension of being creative, the importance of consistency and more. Appreciate you posting this.
Thanks, Vince!
Interesting discussion and I will navigate immediately to Tim’s patch the moment I’ve posted this. Have you come across JE Petersen (Dispatches from inner space) - I don’t seem to be able to link to his Substack but he has been doing a lot of thinking/writing about the distraction of modern technology.
Yes! I've been following JE for a while. Good stuff!
Thanks, Jacqueline. I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I'll go and take a look at JE Petersen's Substack - it sounds like we might have a lot in common!
Very enjoyable conversation. It nicely demonstrates that there are many ways to approach writing and we need to find the one that works for us. And there really isn’t one-size-fits-all “how to write.”
Exactly. I think that, above all, was why Simon and I were excited to put our heads together - it struck us that while we both write speculative fiction we do so in such different ways. I think our conversation illustrates that well. All you can do is keep experimenting to see what works for you (and in the process get to know yourself in a deeper way)
I totally agree.
Very informative dialog. I especially liked the discussion of AI and the distracting power of social media.
Thanks, Bill. Feels like those two topics are going to be focal points for discussion for a while to come.
I think that distinction you make, Simon, between 'distraction platforms' and useful tools is such a salient one and it would serve us well to keep it in mind
I think it's partly what separates pre-2010 internet and post-2010 internet. I mean, the internet has always been full of silly, distracting things, but it wasn't designed specifically for that purpose by cynical corporations. The silly stuff back then was all community-led, and the rest was useful and interesting.
I've only really identified this way of looking at it recently, I think. It's only in retrospect I've properly noticed it.
Absolutely fascinating conversation on a topic that I'm considering as deeply as I can these days, that is whenever I'm actually inhabiting the mundane earth.
I'd like a definitive "do-this" answer, but like all bloody real things it apparently has nuance, so that's where we are now. Lost in the weeds of nuance.
Stupid nuance!
The lack of a definitive "here's how you do it" is endlessly frustrating, but that's life, I suppose. Literally. Glad you enjoyed the conversation even if we had more questions than answers!
This was such a good talk between two authors at the opposite ends of the publishing spectrum, one fully embracing the tech writing life, the other going analogue to be able to write.
I’m also reflecting on MidJourney a lot as I’m using it for visuals for my publication but growing more and more disenchanted with it. Like you say, Simon, they are hollow. Not sure how to replace them for my writing without spending money I don’t earn yet. But it’s becoming a necessity, and to some point a question of identity. We’ll see how this unfolds.
A lot of writers on Substack openly use AI for illustrations, isn't it a tad harsh of you to judge and avoid those writers? It's not an ethical or moral judgement, it's an arbitrary decision.
If this was the start of the printing press, you would have taken a stand against the mass distribution of written material?
There's a vast number of writers on Substack alone, without even thinking about all the OTHER high quality reading I could be doing from other sources. We all have to prioritise what we read, based on often fairly arbitrary decisions. I don't tend to read romance novels with bare-chested muscle men on the front, for example: there might be a superb book behind that cover, but that's a decision I've made.
If a writer uses AI illustrations , and puts them front-and-centre, it's doing a similar thing. The writing could be fantastic, but in a world of infinite stuff to read I have to make some choices. And if it's a choice between a superb piece of writing with an AI illustration and a superb piece of writing without an AI illustration, I'll naturally gravitate towards the latter.
As I noted in the conversation, when it comes to other people's work it's not so much that I'm making an ethical or moral judgement against them. It's more that I find AI art aesthetically and artistically a bit boring. Someone else is free to use those tools, sure, but I can't *not* have that reaction.
I don't quite follow the analogy to the printing press, and mass distribution of written material.
I don't think genre preferences are the equivalent of judgemental decisions.
Lots of Substacks have crappy headers or page layouts, that is, aesthetically displeasing to me, I don't judge the writer for focusing on their words not my visual preferences.
Some day AI will likely help provide you with a diagnosis or successful medical treatment, or help avert a pandemic, or reduce and prevent crime, to offer a few obvious examples amongst thousands.
A recent study found that most people (being nearly everyone) couldn't correctly pick a real human face from the AI generated - most often identifying AI as the real face. Such is the aesthetic advancement of AI.
If someone is paying an artist for illustrations, as a personal statement, that's great, but I can't think of any reason why I would reject exploring a writer for making use of a ubiquitous tool to enhance their work with illustrations.
Without wanting to get into semantics, how do you differentiate 'genre preferences' and 'judgemental decisions'? Aren't they the same thing, in this context?
My point was that if the romance novel had a less cheesy cover, I could well have ended up reading it. Presentation does matter, even if it shouldn't, really, when the words are the main thing.
It's the same with an illustration on a Substack newsletter: if I don't see the illustration, I'll just enjoy the words: but if there's a generic AI image used in the social preview, or stuck prominently at the top of the article for no particular reason, it might prompt some eyebrow raising from me. The question, I suppose, is: what is the image contributing to the article? You ask, quite reasonably, "why I would reject exploring a writer for making use of a ubiquitous tool to enhance their work with illustrations" - my query, I think, is to ask how the tool is *enhancing* the work. In what way is it enhanced by the AI image? If you remove the AI image, is the text made worse or 'un'-enhanced somehow?
MEANWHILE: AI that is used in data analysis, medicine and so on is a very different thing to generative AI used to create images and text. I've read about many incredible use cases in medicine, archaeology and so on. Even if the tech has similar roots, I don't really see it as the same thing. Although the article doesn't go into any detail, this is very cool, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/26/cancer-mrna-vaccine-melanoma-trial
I'm not sure how relevant the point is about most people not being able to distinguish AI from real images. *Most* people can't do *most* things. :) Some people can and do, though. Most people not noticing an AI image doesn't change the fact that I *do* tend to notice. :)
It's also worth noting that I'm primarily talking about the worst/most basic uses of AI images. There are certainly ways to generate more interesting visuals with AI, if you know what you're doing. And if AI components are used as a part of a larger project, you can end up with interesting results. But if someone types in a prompt, grabs the first image, and shoves it into their blog...I don't think that's doing them or their work any favours.
All of this is just my opinion, though: if someone wants to use AI, that's their choice. It's also my choice to de-prioritise that work on my very long reading list.
(the one caveat here is that all of this is without touching upon the ongoing grey area around copyright, permissions, legality and so on, which is a whole other kettle of fish and much more problematic than the aesthetic/preference stuff we've been discussing)
I wasn't really thinking about tacky book covers, even though that's the example you gave.
A year ago I could identify every AI face. Last week, doing the same test used in the study, my score was around 30% correct, still quite a bit better than most students who participated in the study. (There was a sample size, the 'most people' referred only to that sample of people, and only to this task, not to whether or not they could be theoretical physicists or astronauts). This relates solely to your point about aesthetics. AI images are taking on a less distinctly AI aesthetic than a mere year ago.
Some people use an image purely for presenting colour and interest to the top of their newsletter - all those coffee cups and note books don't create themselves. 😂
Others use images to enhance the written experience. Nathan Slake dies this well, for example, as do many others.
An illustration is a glance, while a genre is something someone is going to spend quite a bit of time with, taking up space in their mind for an extended experience. No one keeps flipping back to a book cover or illustration to validate their reading choices.
You've made fleeting AI illustrations a blunt culling tool, which genuinely puzzled me, I was curious to understand why. We all have culling criteria, usually quite specific to our experience, education, taste, reading motivations, etc, and especially for newsletters (choosing books ito read is a whole lot easier). So much to read, so little time, we're all in the same boat.
Students learn about art by looking at art, copyright works, and learn to do art by mimicking original art. LLMs do the same. The difference is thin.
I've not been able to get the vapours about the issue. Maybe legal cases will say otherwise, in due course. It's still early days. I merely watch with interest.
I just don't like the look of a lot of 2023/24-era AI art. I don't know what else I can say to explain myself. :D If other people are fine with that stuff, then that's fine. I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do or not do.
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that corporations scraping vast quantities of copyrighted material in order to make money off selling consumers a software tool is even vaguely the same as students and artists learning from one another. I don't think the difference is thin *at all* (though the AI industry would definitely like us all to think so).
When a student studies an old master, or even just a peer, that learning is directly filtered through the student's human brain. There is intent there, and conscious thought, and meaning. There is, fundamentally, a perspective. And it's all of that weirdness and uniqueness which transforms the studied work into something new, and lifts it above simply being a clone or a derivative work. That's real progress.
An AI doesn't bring a new perspective, or intent, because it can't. That's not how they function. It's absorbing everyone's work, sure, but it isn't learning, or adding anything new to the mix. Anthropomorphising AIs and comparing them to human learning is a bit of a distraction, I think.
A basic AI image tells me nothing about the writer or their work. The only statement it can make is that they used generative AI.
Hundreds of millions of people still use FB or some other social media platform to keep in touch with family and friends. It's always curious that so many people, these days, take pride in denigrating social media, and FB in particular, as a trite distraction, even though most people don't actually use the platforms in that manner, and contrary to hysterical reports.
I loved FB when it launched, because that's precisely what it did - and it was REALLY good at it!
I logged in just now and finding anything from my friends requires wading past weird adverts, irritating short videos (which are not made by my friends) and other random stuff that's designed to grab my attention. (it doesn't help that due to my day job, my notifications are full of client stuff - Meta's insistence on blending work and personal is another thing I dislike. In fact, having to work with Meta systems is a direct factor: the last thing I want to do is have to wrestle with them when I'm not working)
I stopped using Facebook a few years back because I realised I wasn't getting anything useful or entertaining from it. I communicate with friends via WhatsApp and other chat systems which are far less busy. If Facebook was still the core 'communicate with friends' platform it started out as, I'd still be using it. But that's not what Meta design it to be these days. I stuck with Twitter for longer because I was still finding really interesting and useful links and resources there, until 2022 when that imploded.
If these things still work for other people, that's great! It doesn't work for me, though. At best Facebook does nothing of interest for me, at worst it actively distracts me from what I should be doing.
All fair points. I've spent enough time, over years, not daily or even weekly, filtering ads, videos, etc, that I mostly only see relevant content, same with other social media, of which I use rarely, but feel compelled to filter when I do, so that content becomes more relevant. It's easy to be more sanguine about social media if you self tailor it, I think. Plus I've never been a compulsive user, my bordem threshold for trivia and the asinine is low.
Same with Notes, it doesn't hold my attention for long these days.
Although I can never pass up on the Crap Bird Photography FB page.
How did TKH get his publisher? Did online posting/publishing help?
Hi Richard. I got my publisher the old fashioned way: I sent samples of my first finished manuscript to literary agents, and was lucky enough to win representation. My agent then approached publishers and found a home for my stories. Until I'd finished my trilogy of novels I'd never done any online writing. But I've finally admitted that it's no good living in the Dark Ages if I want people to discover my books, so I started my newsletter and am trying to embrace self-promotion. To my surprise, I'm enjoying it a great deal - especially linking up with people here on Substack!
Possibly, things have changed since you became a book author. Or the USA is different from GB. Because I have now entered that wilderness called no agent, and believe me, it's dark and lonely.
We have similar backgrounds in that both of us publish in magazines. So I got a good one for ya. As you know editors are also writers, penning content for their own publications. That's why they love us-- less work to do : ) Anyway, in desperation I contacted two of the bigger mags and asked the editors if they knew any agents. Know what both said? They're looking for agents too! : )
Yes, I believe you're right - it took me a long time to finish my series of books, and in the meantime publishing has changed massively! And rapid change is destabilizing for everybody - we're all looking for solid ground amid the shifting sands. 'Dark and lonely' is, I think, a feeling almost every writer can relate to at one time or another. But there are also ways to find the bright spots, and to keep enjoying what we're doing, and that's perhaps the most important part of the practice...
Thanks TK. "enjoying what we're doing" That's everything.