To AI or not to AI

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“To AI, or not to AI” (an AI adaptation)

To AI, or not to AI—that is the question:
Whether ’tis wiser in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of unassisted thought,
Or to take arms against a sea of problems
And, by assistance, end them. To work—alone—
No more; and by that strain to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh and mind are heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To work—with aid—
To solve, perchance to lose—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that aid of AI what self may fade,
When we have shuffled off our native toil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long a life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The slow grind of thought, the lone invention,
The pangs of doubt, the law’s delay,
The insolence of error, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unassisted takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With but a prompt? Who would burdens bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after—loss
Of self, perhaps, in circuits not our own—
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No author returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

When asked, ChatGPT offers this explanation to Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy:

Core idea: Existential crisis—whether it’s better to endure life or escape it.

Hamlet debates life vs. death, not impulsively, but philosophically. He fears the unknown of death more than the pain of living, which keeps him stuck.

Today’s context:
This is the classic modern existential spiral.
Questions like:

• What’s the point of all this?
• Is enduring suffering meaningful, or just… enduring?
• Why keep going?

It also reflects how uncertainty (about the future, death, consequences) keeps people from making drastic choices—even when they’re deeply unhappy.

I further asked ChatGPT to write an adaptation to focus on AI, as the eternal question. ChatGPT offered that while it could not provide any commentary on ending anyone’s life, it could “shift it to a modern ‘AI vs. not-AI’ question—focused on dependence, identity, and what we lose or gain by leaning on it.”

Well, Alice, we are well down the rabbit hole now, working to sort out our thoughts and desires in a digital world.

Over the years, I have had many story ideas, often sparked by late-night reflections or interactions with friends. Creative discussions used to flow more easily when we all had more free time, but that’s become rare as life gets busier.

On the topic of AI, I recently had a conversation with my brother-in-law and one of my best friends for many years. He has also had many, many stories in the works and maintains a long-time (semi-)active running table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) of the lounge-lizard-and-cave-dweller variety.

I told him at dinner recently, “You know, one of these days I will have to talk to you about AI.”

To which he replied, “Thom, you are one of my longest friends, and it is because of that long-standing friendship and respect that I will not talk to you about AI.”

Well, that escalated quickly. I quickly shifted topics and dropped that topic like it was a lump of white phosphorus in my hand.

In his defense, this was a fact I had previously known but had forgotten at that time. A dear friend of his had been a victim of a heinous crime in the AI realm. To this day, it grated against his morals. As well it should.

As all great friends do, our lives have gone our different paths, and we have had our differences. I married his sister, so he can’t get that far away.

But the topic of AI raises the question: Is there a place for it in the creative industry? Will it go away as a passing fad, or like poor Pandora, will we be left standing in shock as the horrors spew forth, and finally, we dream that the final thing to still out of the jar might be humanity’s “hope”?

My own TTRPG adventures are set in the science-fiction system of Traveller. Following that, I found a Skool site for “AI Game Master Academy”. There, the idea of AI as a tool for game masters is explored. Mostly, however, the courses covered discuss the pitfalls and the definitions of what AI can and cannot do in a game. Also, the morality of using AI is discussed at great length.

Just because you can write a prompt, “Write me a great Traveller RPG adventure,” does not mean you should run roughshod over their intellectual property. Whether you intend to sell it or not. In general, you should change that to “Write me a great science fiction RPG adventure.” It may still harken back to the knowledge of Traveller, Space Opera, or other science fiction RPGs that it was trained in and is familiar with, but leaving out the specific name increases the chance of creating something that is not the intellectual property of others. Ultimately, ‘morality’ is the key.

Last week, I reached out to my brother-in-law, and we had a good discussion about this article and his resistance to AI. He professed to be a late adopter. Not quite a Luddite, mind you, but a more cautious practitioner of technological wonders. And I don’t blame him there. Does the environment reel from the amount of cooling required as we power AI? Yes. Yes, it does. But that is another discussion and for the future to tell. After all, when we started learning our hobbies, didn’t we make mistakes and then learn to correct them to make better widgets?

Anyway, straying off topic here. Should I use AI? To be honest, stepping into the AI field, I have found myself in a massive cavern of new things to learn. Perhaps I am a bit of a late adopter, too. Just dipping my toe into the AI field, I have found a surge of interest in my writing again. I am not trying to write a 70,000-word novel completely by AI. That would be foolish and truly be the epitome of AI Slop, to use the current parlance.

Have we seen this level of culture-changing events happen before? Of course. For a start, in the mid-1400’s, Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable-type printing press. Today, we do not think too much about that, since we can type a whole book on the computer, print it on our home printer, and make it look exactly how we want. But in that time, a massive industry of scribes, copyists, and monks existed, making their living by painstakingly copying the written word to create whole new books. For those few who could read, a book was a wondrous artifact of human dedication and focus.

There are tons more references, and we are still working to clean up after many of them. At least we don’t have to worry about the stench of manure in the streets or have to wipe it from our feet, but we are still working to make the horseless carriage less climate-changing. Again, the automobile and power plant emissions are a topic for another day, but we have to remember where we came from to see how good we have it today. In my own memory, I have seen the smog of Los Angeles go from a toxic mess that ruined people’s lungs to levels today where Los Angeles is again a tolerable place, at least for air breathability.

AI is here to stay; we cannot escape that. What we can do is choose to use this tool in a moral way to ensure that our Humanity stays intact. There will always be bad actors among us. I fear that is what it means to be Human. There are lazy people about. Years ago, a good friend of mine was a victim of a plagiarist. He had copied a work of hers and sold it as his own before she finished it. She took the high road and was not upset terribly about the theft. She no longer trusted him as a friend and knew he would always be a shallow, poor person. She would be able to create more art, at a moment’s notice, but he would always have to wait for someone to look the other way and steal their work.

An AI story in its abuse of artwork? Very much so, it is so much easier for us to steal someone’s style and possibly soul for our own works, but at the end of the day, it is up to each and every one of us to strive to be better people and find that imaginative spark that lives inside each of us. We should raise our children and ourselves to be artists and not plagiarists. Even Robert Heinlein wrote a congratulatory letter to David Gerrold for his Star Trek episode script, noting that they “both owed something to Ellis Parker Butler… and possibly Noah.”

Now we must learn to see AI for what it is: a tool. And use it properly.