Friday, October 17, 2025

This is the ninety-fourth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

It’s Friday again! This seems to be a recurring thing. If you’re ready to relax after a long week and open your seed packet, then here it is. A perfect Florabeast for the cold weather that’s slowly creeping up on us!

At the bottom of every one of these emails is the Human Made icon. It’s part of my commitment to not only avoid using generative AI for any published work, but also be very clear and forthright about it. When I was in negotiations for my narration project coming up next year, I had to specify that I was going to record the audio myself, and not feed the book into an AI narrator and then charge a fee for the trouble. It had honestly never occurred to me to even do that, but that’s the world we’re in now.

The divide between authors used to be traditionally published or self-published, where self-publishing was viewed with disdain because they were the books that “weren’t good enough” for traditional publishing. That stigma has been largely erased, as the resources available for self-publishing have gotten so much better and more affordable. Some people even claim that trad-publishing itself is itself declining, since they aren’t able to keep up with the agile nature of independent authors.

I judge there will be a similar divide between AI authors and human-first (traditional?) authors. People are making the news for being able to convince an AI system to output a full-length novel with plots and characters and things, that doesn’t read like a poorly edited fanfiction. Which is funny, because that’s essentially what AI prose is.

Listen, I’ve got nothing against fanfiction. One of my first major works was a strange mash-up of Wild Arms, Dragonball Z, and Final Fantasy 7/8. My nephew is writing Undertale fanfic. It’s how authors learn their craft nowadays, just like how painters learn to paint by copying other paintings. My daughter meticulously copies Pokémon out of her field manual. This is how we absorb the stories of our ancestors and synthesize them into the new generations.

But fanfiction only exists because there are original stories for people to be fans of. Generative AI only knows one basic story: a humble, boring individual embarks on a journey of self-discovery and gathers allies to overcome evil and return home to live in peace. If you ask it to come up with a “new” story for you, it will just give you some decorated version of this. There’s no creativity, no unique experiences.

Those of us who refuse to accept the narrow mold of the hero’s journey will be the ones who create the stories that future AI systems will copy as their template. We’ll always be able to come up with new ideas, because we bring them out of ourselves, out of our unique creation, rather than dredging them up out of the slop. And that’s why I’m proud to have that little hand down there reminding you that I am in fact a real person, and not a sophisticated AI who tells a lot of really bad jokes and hopes people will read them.

What are your thoughts on AI fiction? The whole point of this newsletter is to help me connect with you, my readers, and with each other too. Reply or comment and let’s chat!