First things first: my anti-AI pledge

For the first official blog post on my sparkling new website I figured I would get the unpleasantness out of the way. That is to say - I will discuss A.I. as it pertains to my writing and my everyday life.

At my day job, the new corporate CEO is an A.I. Bro and singlehandedly changed corporate policy from "no generative A.I. under any circumstances" to "you will use generative A.I. at any given opportunity - so long as you vet and verify any facts or quotes it gives you."

I work in journalism, so essentially that means "have A.I. write things for you... then go ahead and do the work you would have done in the first place in terms of vetting and verifying facts and quotes."

Even this website, the hosting service and the website building program - all A.I. services being offered, from image creation to actually writing the pages and content, are being heartily ignored.

About a year and a half ago, when I set out to write Bloodbound, I actually did sign up with an artificial intelligence writing service. It had been sold to me as a "true author's friend" type of program. It would help identify plot holes, it promised. It could offer alternative sentences and paragraphs. It would even help me outline plan out remaining chapters.

But in doing so, it was spitting out trash. Its "helpful suggestions" included far-out details, characters and plot points I hadn't even hinted at, misgendered virtually every character, etc. etc. etc.

I don't know why it didn't dawn on me as I began writing the first book that what I was doing was feeding the machine. And feeding a poor quality machine, at that.

I cut my losses when I came to that realization, both monetarily and literally, and started to rewrite my story from the beginning, wiping the slate clean.

I vowed from that moment on that no artificial intelligence program would have any role in my creating Bloodbound -- and that includes mere grammatical checking programs. I'll rely on dictionaries, thesauruses, and good old-fashioned spell-check to complete my stories, thank you very much.