Slow Down. Consume Less. Connect More.

“Are you going to write something again soon?” A sweet friend from church asked me last Sunday. 

“I hope so. I’ve just been so busy,” I told her, wrapping my arm around her shoulders and giving her a squeeze. 

She asks me this often, and if I have published something on my blog lately, she always tells me she read it and liked it—which is surprising considering half of what I publish is borderline blasphemous (See “The Gospel in 300 Words”)

My answer to her was not entirely true. I have been busy, but I have also been writing (and rewriting) and thinking and writing more, but nothing I put out feels quite right to publish on the blog. 

I’m working on my third novel, a romantic thriller. I thought it would be fun to combine a cozy, small town romance with a heartpounding thriller. I’m a little over 20,000 words into the project, and I think it’s going to be a good one.

I write in cycles. I’ll write a few thousand words in a day or two and then take a two week break. While I want to develop a stronger writing practice, it’s just not a priority right now, among all the other things happening in my life. I write creatively when I can, and that’s enough for me at this time. 

Another challenge I’ve been facing with my writing is discouragement due to the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). For writers (and creatives in general), it feels like trying to sweep back the tide. Even though true writers refuse to use generative AI for their writing, the number of people using it, encouraging us to use it, or trying to scam us by using it instead of providing real services is astronomical. 

It seems like every advertisement—whether it’s a flyer or social media ad—is AI generated these days. A couple weeks ago, I had lunch with my mom and a friend at the local Mexican restaurant, and every flyer in the front window was generated by AI. Each one had the telltale structure—a large headline, four callouts, and flat under-exposed looking filter over the whole thing. Whether it was for a real estate open house, a professional wrestling league coming to the Moose Lodge, or a car show fundraiser for the volunteer fire department, they all looked exactly the same.

I’ve noticed the same issue with social media posts lately as well, whether it is an advertisement or content created by a real person. Ads often use an AI agent—a human-looking animation—sharing unbelievable results of the day’s wellness fad. Even people who take the time to film their own videos use AI-generated captions that all have the same language structure and bulleted emoji list. The result of this monotony is an endless feed of monochromatic slop.

But let’s get back to books. 

If you’re an avid reader like me, you may have a subscription to Kindle Unlimited. It’s basically a library service for eBooks published through Kindle. In the past, it was mostly self-published authors or up-and-coming authors putting their work on KU so they could get discovered, but now, there are more popular books available. (I’m currently reading Katabasis by R.F. Kuang with my book club, and I rented it on KU). Despite this, there are a ton of self-published books on Kindle Unlimited. 

Perhaps I will compare traditional publishing to independent publishing in another blog post, but here’s what you need to know for now. Many independent (indie) authors publish through Kindle Unlimited to get their work out there. They spend time and money to make sure they produce something that is as good of quality as what you would buy from a traditional bookstore like Barnes & Noble. The issue is that they are publishing their books using the same tools as people who aren’t putting in the same amount of effort, and therefore, their high-quality work is drowning in a sea of low-quality AI slop.

ChatGPT can generate a novel-length manuscript in about 30 minutes. There are people who will take these outputs from ChatGPT, publish them on Amazon, and flood the market with fake books. This creates intense competition for people like me and many of my friends who actually put the time and effort into writing a book without cheating the assistance of generative AI.

I don’t know if there’s a solution to generative AI flooding the publishing market. It’s destroying creative fields, and I don’t trust our government or corporations to do what is right over what is profitable. They are going to continue building data centers that consume natural resources and strain utility systems, replace human labor and creativity with robots, and steal and destroy intellectual property for the sake of “innovation.” 

Despite this, I still have agency, and I can choose to prioritize people over profit. I can choose to produce creative work the right way—with my real, human intelligence. 

Generative AI is just another symptom of greed. It’s the result of a society that prioritizes profits over people, quantity over quality, and speed over standards.

Slow down. Consume less. Connect more. Only then can we save ourselves.