Do I Continue to Feed the Beast?

Aghh, I've lost two days of my holiday because I've had to change roles at work. This year I get to look forward to more hours, more busy work, less pay and a multitude of hoops to jump through to prove I can do the job I had been doing for the past three years because I didn't take a straight forward path to teaching. I have a day and a half to not think about all that, tomorrow evening will be scooping together everything I need to go back to work and prepare for my course, so today I'm going elsewhere with my thoughts.

Last weekend I went on a writers' retreat with some friends my writing group. Well, writers' retreat is a loose label. We went to a summer cottage in the Turku archipelago, in the west of Finland. This was our fourth year of having a Helsinki Writers Group retreat since Covid, though we missed the last two years, I think, due to low numbers. It's hard to organise 6 or more people to do anything together, but totally worth it when we manage. 

We did a few writing things, had writing related talks and did writing prompts. I did a lot of journaling, but mostly we just hung out and did Finnish summer cottage things: picked berries and mushrooms, walked in the woods, sauna'd and jumped in the sea, drank a bit, played some games and ate a lot of food. All in all, a lovely relaxing weekend, except for the long drive. 

Forest walk. 

One of the presentations from a lovely writer that works in IT was on AI witch hunts for writers: how to recognise AI writing (most of which they have already found ways around) and avoid our writing being mistaken for AI. How is this even a problem?! 

But I know it is, it's a debate that has popped up around the edges of this blog. I have started posting this blog on Substack as well as Blogger and Substack has recently introduced an AI checker for posts, via Pangram. I don't think posters can opt out of this as it's supposedly to protect the reader from believing AI slosh is human-generated. (Maybe you can, I'm still trying to read the instructions.) I'm not sure how often it happens with writing, but I do see a lot of AI-generated images everywhere. It's sad that on a site for writers and creatives, posters are so hungry for likes and subscribers that they would use AI at all, but I guess they do. 

I've been trying to ignore it, but it's making me reconsider whether I want to post this also on Substack because I fear this checker will be feeding my work directly into Pangram's LLM AI. I don't want to help train AI to write more like a person. (Checking this before posting - Substack says it doesn't use the detector to train AI and that it offers a block from external training models. Why do I not feel reassured?)

When I voiced this concern, my friend pointed out that my writing was probably being gobbled up in other ways. They are finding countless ways at consuming as much raw data as they can, possibly even scanning copies of last available hardcopies of books and then shredding them. Maybe this is just scaremongering, but with AI nothing feels implausible, just a warning.

This is where we are at, in my lifetime we've gone from the excitement of Pong and writing simple 001 code commands to AI writing our stories and poems and faking photographs of sunsets to make someone money through little digital hearts. We have to prove that we are writing our thoughts ourselves, that we were the one behind the camera or the pen.

The easy answer is don't post online and again I'm left to wonder why I do. Why do I like seeing the finished post, why do I check my stats to see if anyone is reading? I couldn't tell you how many subscribers I have (hello out there, if there are any), I don't charge to read my posts, but I'm not immune to the dopamine rush from being published, from being read. 

So for that moment of chemical pride, do I have to just accept that AI is reading this and eating it up in its greedy digital maw to regurgitate my meandering human style at some later date, that bots are most of my visits rather than real eyes? In 2026, I guess I do. 

How long will I hesitate before I hit Publish?

. . . 

Not even an hour and some of that time was spent looking for Blogger's AI policy (doesn't seem to have one) and reading Substack's AI detector instructions and info. Sad, but here I am. 

AI Trigger Warning

A member of my writing group asked last night what we would think about them bringing a story that AI had translated for them. I have to admit my gut clenched and I immediately voiced my negative opinion. 

But I get it. As an international group, most of our writers have English as a second or third language, but we ask that everything shared with the group be mainly written in English. It is difficult to write comfortably in a language that is not your mother tongue. I use translation software regularly just to get through my daily life in a country where I don't speak the language well. I use spell check in my own writing as a backup for my own skills. I have however tried to turn off all the AI add-ons with my word processing software, emails and other apps, regularly write -ai when doing a search on the internet. I am very aware it still invades every part of my online life.

The thought of AI working its way into a group that is focused on the craft of writing scared and upset me a bit. 

I work with middle-school students and the reliance on AI to help them learn from both the students, teachers and administrators scares me. I constantly have kids asking me why they need to learn Maths or other subjects when they can just ask their phones to do it for them. I'm running out of answers. 

While our admin is telling us to use AI to do lesson planning, the school has banned phones and have had to find various ways to lock down the tablets the lower and middle school students use from going to sites that gather data. GDPR is the law in Europe. Teachers are having to find ways around kids using AI to do their work for them, going back to paper and pencil in many cases. I see the results of children growing up with the internet and AI, students without learning needs being unable to tell time on an analog clock, remember basic times tables and maths skills, unable to spell or to trust their own abilities to write a paragraph, to analyse a poem. 

Non-native speakers are taking longer to learn English because they rely on translation software for both reading and writing. I've seen student write a whole paragraph or more in their mother tongue and then paste the translation into an assignment and insist they had written it themselves. They no longer see the line between themselves and the software. 

But this is about creation and crafting. The writer had written the story themselves in their mother tongue, but wanted to share an English version for the group's feedback. As the conversation advanced they said they had translated the story first themselves, then asked AI to translate it too and then compared them. They said they were very similar. They then asked the AI to mark areas where it didn't appear in native English and then merged the two versions to improve the English. The line gets blurrier and blurrier. Did they write the English version, did they translate it?

I said I'd rather see the writer's original translation and we could support them in terms of highlighting areas that could be improved to native English usage. I said ideally I'd prefer what I say to my English learner students, use software to translate the occasional word or phrase, but try to write/translate it yourself. Use the language you have. That's learning the craft of writing; sculpting the story, the poem from the writer's own imagination and skills.  

It opened an interesting discussion. We have a lot of tech people in the group who had various opinions on AI. We discussed how using AI feeds the big LLMs, how companies had used writers' work to teach AI without permission and ways we use AI to support our writing. We also wondered about the future. Is this like the Industrial Revolution where we just find a way to implement a version of AI into our lives to improve them or would there be a backlash as we see it is harmful or will we welcome our robot overlords with open arms? I know I will be one of the first up against the wall. 

The group probably needs to come up with a policy of whether we would be open to reading work that had a large input from AI, in terms of creation, editing, translation or refining, but it felt too big a task last night. I asked, jokingly but not joking, for a trigger warning if AI is used, like we ask for difficult topics. The group has always been open to reading all things, but ask to know if a piece has the potential to upset people. To be honest, AI has the same affect on me. 

Do you have an opinion on AI and creative writing or translation?

Part of my students' class poem, no AI was used in its creation, though Snoopy helped a bit.