The Silent Wave

I started writing poetry in 8th grade which then turned into a full blown creative writing class in 12th grade in lieu of English. Or at least traditional English anyway, but it's one of my fondest memories.

We were given a prompt daily, followed by real full blown story prompts and each week we were to submit a short story within showing the complexities of writing. With Mr. Gulath I learned so much that year, that he really sparked me to continue writing into adulthood. I am working on writing these stories out here on Vocal Media, so I can reflect on my growth as a writer into my adulthood as a part of a series titled Dear Younger Me. This platform has also given me a safe creative space to write out my feelings and thoughts to help me cope with mental health issues that seem to plague my daily life.

I get up and write, and it forces me to sort of have a routine. With Bipolar Disorder you get on these manic highs and lows. Sometimes your thoughts are racing a thousand miles a minute, and then other times your thoughts are shallow and painful, but the point is writing allows you to be in a space to get these thoughts out of your head and onto paper.

I got back into creative writing outpatient therapy groups at the VA in 2022 and one of my short stories, which I published to Vocal Media was ranked nationally as one of the top short story essays! I will link that below as well, but the point is writing comes from this place as a personal form of therapy for my heart and soul. So when I saw Philip Defranco's recent piece on Chat GPT using AI I think there's a true concern here for writers everywhere that should be sounding the alarm bells.

Simply put, this is the worst AI will EVER BE. Let me use a prompt for a second that is current in Vocal's challenge section:

Write a limerick about the absurdities of life.

I myself have already submitted my own work into this competition. Works that were thought out and I feel like are well written, whether the judges see that or not is an entirely different story. However what if I told you there's a way to cheat the system and have a robot write an entire poem for you? Or write an entire short story? Or a Children's Book? Or even a full blow adult fantasy novel? And worse It's free. You put no thought into this.

"Chat GPT is an AI Chatbot developed by Open AI. The chatbot has a language-based model that the developer fine-tunes for human interaction in a conversational manner. Effectively it's a simulated chatbot primarily designed for customer service; people use it for various other purposes too though."

Basically you create an account. It's free, and you can literally ask it anything, and it will come up with constructive answers within a matter of seconds that sound personal and real. So let's take that prompt that we have from vocal that I put above here, and this is the poem it created for me.

There once was a man quite perplexed,

By the strange twists that life often flexed,

He tried to make sense,

Of its odd events,

But concluded it's best to be vexed.

Scary isn't it? It meets the complete criteria of what Vocal is asking, now if I wanted to put ZERO effort into this, I can ask it to create a title to that poem.

The title of the limerick could be "Life's Perplexing Absurdities".

Guess what? That's the new reality of what's coming to publishing and creative writing. It's no longer creative. I created a prompt for vocal media within 45 seconds. It would take longer for me at this point to choose the photo that goes with this article on Vocal. Literally if this doesn't raise red flags for you I would be concerned. There's so much you can do with it, and there's people on YouTube right now that are showing you tutorials on how to use ChatGPT to go in and create children's books for self-publishing through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Full blown short stories, and more. All for the sake of creating a permanent source of passive income, and using it as the new "get out of debt" become rich over night scheme.

My concern is that with this platform growing at the rate that it does daily, I worry that when I submit my stories and really personal writings to the platform, that they will be dimmed out by a story created essentially by a robot. People are looking for "easy ways to get out of debt" that they are literally smothering out real try and true creative writers and authors. Hell you can go and hire a ghost writer on Fiverr for $1200 and have them create a full blown book that you get all the rights to. Hire an editor and directly upload to KDP. You can't compete with traditional publishing anymore. Not to mention you can then create bundles, then upload them to print on demand services, and then create audio books for minimal to nothing. Seriously that's what the writing space has come to.

But with this ChatGPT you essentially cheat the system, and my worry is the robots will drown out real authentic authors and creators in the process. It's good for organizing a story line or plot just because sometimes getting a prompt is hard, but I just worry about entering some of these challenges, and loosing to someone who will inevitably cheat the system and have a damn good poem or story written by a robot. I can't compete with that.

It's concerning, because AI is also stealing artists actual art from the internet as well, and so much more because it has to pull from somewhere. original sources. The problem also now becomes an issue in the artist space because people are essentially "stealing" works from artist who put a ton of time into their craft and they are using the designs in these children's books without the consent of the artist, which looses out on commissions from the creators themself, who depending on their talents for a living.

I hope there is going to be something coming down the pipes that essentially will essentially check work for authenticity when it comes to these contests. Or at least require you to submit/claim that you used AI or ChatGPT to create the work that you did. So Vocal, because I know you read all of our submissions. Please do yourself a favor, please consider adding this to your rules and regulations if you haven't already, that these have to be creative pieces, without the use of AI or at least make them claim that they used it if they do. Please keep this a safe space for those who use this, because it's all about transparency.

-Kayla