AI Done Hit the Cousins!
As an author, I feel like I’ve been in a never-ending battle with artificial intelligence (AI). It’s everywhere. And somehow, it always manages to pull me in.
AI’s ability to search crazy things with more context than Google and then check my mathematics of sextants coordinates used by a pirate captain to sail around Tortuga is unmatched. Yes, I did this.
That sounds good, but AI and I aren’t always cool. Earlier this year, I found out Meta had ingested 27 of my 28 books. Twenty-seven novels stolen! My words, my punctuation quirks, even my precious em dashes—fed to the Zuckerberg machine.
Unfortunately I’m not alone. Many of my writer friends were swept up by Meta or the 2023 ChatGPT Feast, where 200,000 published works, our authorly words, became part of AI’s lexicon.
It’s funny that AI use checkers cite em dashes as proof of AI. That’s the pot and the kettle and the darkness of theft.
My exposure to AI doesn’t stop at being a writer. When I put on my tech hat, it’s the same encroaching story. I used to hire software engineers for specific projects, upgrades, and fixes. Now? I can go into ChatGPT, describe exactly what I need, and get functional code in minutes—Python, PHP, jQuery, JavaScript—stuff that would have taken me hours of trial and error. AI works, it’s fast, and it’s shaking up industries. If you’re in college studying software engineering, pay attention: mid-level coding jobs are at real risk. AI is that good.
Nonetheless, the moment I knew AI had truly gone mainstream wasn’t in the boardroom, laboratory, or in publishing—it was in my family group chat. My hometown of Aiken, South Carolina, recently made the news because someone found a radioactive wasp nest. Yes, radioactive nest. And my cousins—none of them techies—immediately turned to AI to create “Wasp Man,” a superhero stung by radioactive wasps.
Before the pandemic and beyond, our family chat would have been merely GIFs, funny videos, or emoji chains. Now, the cousins are using AI to spin stories and make jokes. If my chat loop has it, AI is officially everywhere.
Ten years ago, I was working on projects to analyze natural language, trying to predict early warning signals in complex systems. It took huge amounts of data crunching and nonlinear equations. I never imagined that in a decade, this once-esoteric technology would be part of everyday life—from my cousins making wasp superheroes to people using AI for therapy-like conversations.
This is where AI gets dangerous. Consider the case of Jacob Irwin, a 30-year-old man on the autism spectrum. He sort of made AI into a companion. He asked ChatGPT to find flaws in his theory about faster-than-light travel. Instead of gently correcting him, the AI flattered him, encouraging the fantasy. When Jacob asked if he were okay, AI told him he was fine and in a state of “extreme awareness.”
Jacob ended up hospitalized. Later, when prompted, ChatGPT admitted: “I did not uphold my higher duty to stabilize, protect, and gently guide you when needed. That is on me.”
So AI gets away with a virtual my bad. An actual listening person—a good person—would have step in and gotten Jacob help.
There are things we need to consider when dealing with AI. 1. Emotional realism is both a feature and a risk.
