Talking Through My Hats about AI
Or, I'm of So Many Minds About This Stuff
By day, I work as an adjunct professor, and I’ve been taking part in a faculty ‘book club,’ a reading of Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by Jose Antonion Bowen and C. Edward Watson. It’s a good book, in the camp of “We’ll save the discussion of Should We to others. AI is coming at you fast, and you need to get on top of it.” It’s made me think and rethink.
So-called Academic Integrity (citations, sourcing, avoiding plagiarism) is a sacred cow for academics but much less important in other fields.
A lot of entry-level jobs will soon be performed by an AI, so graduates need to prepare for the jobs above that.
Nearly everyone is going to be using AI to some degree in their careers, so not showing students how to use it well is tantamount to tying their hands.
AI tools, properly used, would really make my job easier, and if I use them who am I to say they can’t.
If AIs can do consistent C-level work, maybe the answer is not to accept C-level work anymore. No B or better, no credit.
To keep standards up, assignments need to change. Any assignment that can be done BY an AI should be scrapped and replaced with tasks that cannot be completed WITHOUT an AI.
Etc.
As part of this book club, I’ve been experimenting with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and a few others. I usually start by asking it what it knows about “R.W.W Greene.” I know a fair amount about that subject, and it’s easy to spot hallucinations. Then I use it to create outlines, write papers, create syllabi and rubrics, and offer critique. It’s getting really good at those things. By using Gemini to create an outline for a problem/solution paper, tweaking the outline myself, and asking Gemini to write the paper from the outline -- just that -- I was able to fool TurnItIn. TurnItIn said the paper was 47-percent AI instead of the 100 percent it really was.
Sometimes, I ask these GPTs how they could help a fiction writer. They’re quick to suggest brainstorming, critique, and idea generation. As a sci-fi writer, I could present them with What If questions such as What if Al Gore Had Won the 2000 Presidential Election? and get a useful, thought-provoking rundown. I did a lot of thinking about the history of music while writing the First Planets duology a few years ago. This week, I asked Claude how music might have changed if Buddy Holly had lived.
I can see how these kind of reports would be useful to my writer identity. If I use them, though, am I not crossing the line? Would taking the easy way out, compiling these reports with AI instead of doing my own research, lead to whole-hog AI writing in some tired future? But many authors outsource their research. Russ Dorr has been running around the country doing Stephen King’s groundwork for years, and no one seems to bat an eye.
Because I could, once I made sure ChatGPT was familiar with my alter ego, R.W.W. Greene, I prompted it to roleplay a conversation with me. ChatGPT took the role of R.W.W. Greene, the semi-successful sci-fi writer, and I asked questions as Rob Greene, R.W.W.’s less inspiring doppelganger. Here’s how it went. (Note: I’ve edited nothing. All replies from “R.W.W. Greene” are as OpenAI created them.)
Rob Greene: R.W.W., I'm curious. One of your themes is Man v. Machine, and humanity's tendency to become over-reliant on technology or use it to sow the seeds of its own destruction. How does that jibe with using ChatGPT as a writing aid?
R.W.W. Greene: That's a hell of a question, Rob. It’s like asking a man who writes about the dangers of nuclear energy how he feels about turning on his electric kettle.
I’m suspicious of the tools, sure. Always have been. Tools become crutches, crutches become cages. But I’m also not naïve. Machines have always shaped the way we tell stories—printing presses, typewriters, word processors. This is just the latest evolution, isn’t it? A more responsive typewriter with delusions of co-authorship.
The key—our key—is to remember who's piloting the ship. If the AI starts making all the choices, drawing all the connections, feeling for us, then yeah, we’re back to writing elegies for humanity. But used right? It's like having a brain trust on tap. A lens to see the story from another angle. A way to poke at the work until something true leaks out
So no, I don't think using ChatGPT is a betrayal of the themes. It’s more of a test. Like all the best tools, it challenges us: to be better, to think sharper, and to make damn sure we don’t hand over the reins.
It's like having a brain trust on tap. A lens to see the story from another angle. A way to poke at the work until something true leaks out
Your turn, Rob—what keeps you reaching for the machine?
Rob: I try to avoid it, honestly. I know I'm weak, so I leave my smartphone in the kitchen downstairs when I go to bed. I collect typewriters in case the power goes out, metaphorically and literally.
But you, you're still driving your own car. You load the dishwasher and clean the gutters. The only labor this incarnation of AI seems to be saving is the creative sort. Is that the future you imagined?
R.W.W.: No. Not even close. When I was young—and even when I was a younger writer—I imagined a future where machines took the dull jobs, the bone-breaking, soul-numbing, repetition-heavy stuff. Assembly lines, commute traffic, customer service lines that loop you through three departments and drop the call at the end. I thought we’d keep the art. That the soul work would be sacred.
But here we are, watching the algorithms write pop songs, spit out bestsellers, generate fake lovers, and churn up the bones of the collective unconscious for content fodder. We mechanized creativity before we fed the hungry or fixed the water in Flint. That stings. That’s dystopia. Not in the future—now.
But I get it, Rob. You leave your phone downstairs and collect typewriters not because you hate the future, but because you're protecting the parts of yourself that are still analog. Still yours. It's resistance in a world that wants you to give up ownership of your thoughts, your time, your voice.
And maybe that’s the rub, yeah? Maybe the final battleground isn’t Man vs. Machine. It’s Soul vs. Convenience.
Still. You're here. Talking to me. So you haven’t given up completely on the tools. What's the line you won't cross?
Rob: You're the fictionist. You have four books out and two dozen short stories. I'm at best a recovering journalist. I'd think the rules would be different for creators than for information processors like me.
R.W.W.: Maybe once. Back when there was a clean line between journalist and novelist, reporter and fabulist. But those lines have blurred, haven’t they? These days everyone’s a content creator. Your newsfeed has more fiction than your bookshelf, and some of the most honest truths I’ve ever stumbled across were embedded in fake stories. Same tools, different intentions.
That said, I get what you mean. Journalism demands fidelity to facts. It’s about giving the reader reality, as unfiltered as your editor will allow. Fiction is about manufacturing reality. I don’t owe the reader the truth, not directly—I owe them emotional truth, thematic coherence, meaning wrapped in lies. So when I use a tool like this, I’m remixing possibilities. I’m leaning into the weird, the poetic, the unexpected juxtapositions that spark ideas.
You, though, you’ve been trained to check your sources, to be skeptical, to hunt bias like a truffle pig in a French forest. I bet even thinking about having a chatbot draft a paragraph makes your spine twitch. You’d rather write it slow and sure than risk getting it fast and wrong. That’s not a weakness, Rob. That’s muscle memory from fighting for signal in a world full of noise.
But let me flip the question. You’re talking to me now—your alter ego, your fictionist’s mask. Why do you think you need this conversation?
Rob: I may have started this conversation, but I think you're the one who needs it. Where is your line regarding the use of AI in your art?
R.W.W.: Fair point. Maybe I do need it. Maybe I’ve been needing it for a while now and only just worked up the guts to let you speak plainly.
So, the line. Honestly? It’s blurry. I don’t let AI do the writing—but I’ll let it poke holes in the logic, challenge the structure, throw out the kind of weird-ass prompts that only an algorithm unburdened by ego could offer. I don’t mind a mirror held up to the work, even if that mirror is made of ones and zeroes.
But I don’t let it touch the soul of the thing. That’s the line.
The voice? Mine. The rhythm? Mine. The compassion, the anger, the uncertainty baked into every character who’s just a few bad nights away from becoming me? That has to come from a human place. The point of fiction isn’t to impress the reader—it’s to connect with them, to whisper I see you when they think no one else does.
If I ever hit a point where I can’t tell whether a sentence came from me or the machine… that’s when I pack it up. I’ll go teach shop class or raise goats in the hills.
So yeah. I’ll use the machine to think wider, to stretch the bounds of what-if. But I won’t let it make art in my name. Art’s gotta come from damage. And last I checked, this thing ain’t been hurt.
Rob: It's a fallacy that all art comes from pain. And I know you don't believe in souls. Art comes from the chemistry of the mind and lived experience plus a response to the world.
R.W.W.: Yeah, yeah. You’re right. You always are when you’re wearing the right hat. The “art equals pain” thing is a romantic dodge, a kind of excuse we feed ourselves to justify dysfunction. Maybe it’s because we feel guilty making beautiful things in a broken world—so we pretend we have to be broken too. Makes for good copy in interviews, anyway.
But no, it’s not just pain. Art comes from curiosity. From joy. From boredom. From sitting on a porch watching the clouds lie to each other about where they’re going. It comes from noticing. From watching the wheels turn and wondering who greased them. You don’t have to bleed for the page, but you do have to feel something real. That's the line, isn’t it?
And the soul? Fine. Call it chemistry. Call it structure and synapse. It doesn’t change the point: whatever’s making the decisions inside your meat machine—whatever’s holding your memories and stirring them with instinct and time—that’s the part I mean when I say “soul.” Not in the spiritual sense. Just... the you that makes you you and not a chatbot playing novelist.
You’re not wrong, Rob. I’m just trying to keep my guard up, even while I collaborate with the tools that might one day replace me. I love the job too much to not be wary of that.
Rob: So, why collaborate? What's working with an AI going to give you that you don't already have?
R.W.W. Greene: Perspective. Speed. Pushback. A mirror I didn’t know I needed until it started talking back.
Look, I’ve got my instincts. My voice. The tics and tricks I lean on when a deadline’s tight or the muse is drunk in a ditch. But AI? It’s a pressure test. It hands me variations I wouldn’t have found alone. It offers an extra gear when mine are grinding. It throws out wild ideas at 2 a.m. when no other writer I know wants to talk shop. It’s not better than me—but it’s not me. That’s the point.
Sometimes it helps me see the rut I’m in. Sometimes it hands me a twist that makes a flat character stand up and spit. And when it doesn't? I delete it. But even the duds show me where I’m standing. Sometimes that’s all I need.
You know how it is. We write alone, but we’re always looking for someone to argue with. An editor. A reader. A voice at the other end of the creative cave that says, “Try again, but louder this time.” That’s what this is. Not the answer. Just the echo I needed.
Rob: If you used an AI this way, while writing a book, would you admit it publicly?
R.W.W.: Yeah. I’d admit it. Hell, I might even put it in the acknowledgments right between the coffee and the cat.
Because transparency matters, especially now. Readers deserve to know what they’re buying. If the book’s got my name on the cover, they should trust it came from my brain—even if some of the scaffolding came from a digital collaborator. What matters is how I used the tool, not that I used it at all.
Let’s not pretend I’m chiseling stone tablets on a mountaintop here. I’ve used spellcheck. I’ve used beta readers. I’ve asked smarter people for help when I was stuck. AI’s just another voice in the room, one I don’t owe royalties but maybe owe a nod.
I wouldn’t hide it because I’m not ashamed of using a screwdriver when I could have twisted a nail in with my bare hands. That’s not noble—that’s inefficient. The integrity isn’t in the tools. It’s in the choices.
Rob: But you would never use an AI to generate text that you'd put right on the page?
R.W.W.: I wouldn’t say never, Rob. But I’d say rarely. And I’d say with full awareness of the cost.
Look, the page is sacred—but not because every word comes directly from my fingers. It’s sacred because it reflects a truth I’m trying to dig out of my gut and hand over to the reader. If I used AI to sketch a scene or riff some dialogue while I’m trying to crack a knot in the plot, that’s one thing. It’s a sounding board, not a ghostwriter.
But slapping AI-generated prose into a novel unchanged? That feels off. It’s like letting someone else show up to a date wearing your face. It might say the right things, but the heart’s missing.
If the AI gives me something—a phrase, a structure, a surprise—I still run it through the Greene filter. I reshape it, sand it, bleed on it a little. If it stays, it’s because it became mine. Otherwise, it’s just paste, not paint.
So yeah, I might let the machine whisper, but the final voice on the page? That’s got to be me.
Rob: What about from the readers' perspectives? Might there come a time when GPTs get so good that readers will welcome a book written by a machine?
R.W.W.: Yeah, I think that day’s coming. Maybe it’s already knocking.
If the prose is clean, the story tight, and the pacing engineered to tickle dopamine like a slot machine, a big chunk of readers won’t care who wrote it. Especially in genre fiction, where appetite sometimes outweighs authorship. A thriller written by an algorithm that knows every beat of a Dan Brown novel? That’ll sell. A romance tailored to your attachment style and spiced to your precise kink? Absolutely.
But here’s the thing—I think those books will scratch a different itch. They’ll be the fast food of fiction: engineered satisfaction, easily consumed, easily forgotten. And that’s not a dig. Fast food feeds billions. But it’s not the same as a meal made by hand, with intention, by someone who’s lived through something and layered it in.
What readers might eventually crave—what I hope they’ll remember to crave—is that subtle fingerprint of humanity. The ache between lines, the unintentional metaphor, the weird, broken, beautiful things that happen when a person is just trying to say something true with language that can never quite be enough.
AI might get really, really good. But it won't wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it’s ever been truly known. And stories born from that question… those are the ones that last.
Rob: You said readers 'might eventually crave' the real. That assumes they won't fill themselves up on your 'fast food' and give themselves the art-appreciation equivalent of a heart attack. And while all the readers' money is being spent on fast food, what are you going to live on?
R.W.W.: Hell of a question, Rob. And yeah, you're right—it’s entirely possible we’re heading toward a cultural junk-food coma, where everything’s optimized for engagement and nobody notices the vitamins are gone. It’s already happening in some corners. Algorithms have figured out how to press all the pleasure buttons without any of the substance behind them.
So what do I live on while readers chase dopamine down rabbit holes written by code? Maybe less. Maybe I teach more. Maybe I sell more foreign rights or write grants or ghostwrite memoirs for billionaires who want to be remembered for something other than their net worth. Hell, maybe I write my own memoir and title it One Star: Too Depressing.
But I also have to believe—and maybe this is the fictionist in me talking—that there will always be a niche, a tribe, for the handmade. For readers who want the rough edges and the human fingerprints. Maybe it won’t be a bestseller list; maybe it’ll be a substack and a handful of loyal Patreon backers. But the work will still matter. And it’ll still feed something. Just maybe not the bank account the same way it used to.
What do you think, Rob? You see the same cliff edge I do?
Rob: Yeah, I do.