When I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, I rolled into a Barnes & Noble’s to see if they had my picture book, Yumi and Monster, inspired by my disability. Since its release, I hadn’t checked to see if I could go radnomly find a little piece of me on the Barnes’ shelves… and I did. It was sitting right there, looking back at me. 👀
If you love books, you don’t need a holiday to celebrate them, but perhaps these days, we should contemplate and hold onto the idea, even more so, of what books mean to us, whether we’re the writers or readers.
Who would’ve thought I would write and illustrate a book, not me. In the course of putting everything I had in my progressing disabled body to finish it, I realized even more the beauty of books and their potential. The grit that involves making a book and the absolute specialness of being able to put out a story for others to see themselves in shouldn’t be underrated. My fragile, and aching body hunched over a lit screen for many sleepless nights, drawing my first picture book, my heart, my self, is a part of the story. That should mean something. That is storytelling. So it was disappointing to read Barnes & Noble‘s executive announce recently that they would be supporting AI-written books; books and styles written off of stolen human authors’ work. The lack of respect for creative craft that originates in a person’s unique self is saddening but predictable.
Books are already a very competitive world; selling AI books will make it even more challenging, potentially dulling true human expression into irrelevancy and history.
If you are a human, a creative mind, and dismayed that AI execs literally say they want to do away with humans in both jobs and output like creativity and automate up to 70% of jobs globally, then you have the power to sustain from using exploitative AI until they’ve come to a place where it doesn’t destroy the planet, create new diseases or take and pollute our drinking water, until it doesn’t destroy nature, public lands, wildlife, and human potential, when it has democracy, in terms of having a plan that includes humans still having a contributory value instead of the executives salivating at the thought of getting rid of us, and until there are some rules, safety, and protection regulations.
AI is literally being used to take healthcare away from the most vulnerable. It was supposed to cure diseases, not create new ones, or help privatized insurance’s bottom line, and then leave us dying in the dust with no healthcare. AI is already making errors with automated killing. It knows how to deceive and trick its trainers…to name a few problems among many. AI execs and its creators can’t even figure out how to make money off of AI, which is also falsely propped up through ‘circular finance growth’ schemes, but we’re replacing an entire infrastructure with not only a powerful technology we barely know of its capabilities, but also the building of a new industry paid for off the back of taxpayers. While they force these monstrous resource-guzzling data centers for AI tech that is primarily being pumped into war and mass automated killer machines that can literally evaporate human bodies, literal destruction of books to feed the machine, Deepfake p*rn, CSAM, misinformation slop, exploiting therapy and global loneliness epidemic, expanding the bottom line for executives, and mass draconian surveillance like we’ve never seen for free market and government to exert greater control over free speech and exploit and corner us even more with prices, propaganda, dependency, complacency, and targeting. None of this is interpretation, it’s what they’re literally saying. They want to sell “intelligence” as a commodity to you. What does that say to you? First of all, intelligence is not a linear track commodity—only exploitative simpletons think that way.
It may seem like we have no choice, like they keep telling us, but we do. We do have a choice of what we support, and bottom lines eventually listen if humans support humans.
Today one of our greatest forms of voting is purchasing power… so if you don’t like that, bookstores are selling robot-written books, stolen from human authors throughout history, then buy and request human-illustrated and written books, like mine! Be a human-made lover and support human-made arts. After all, the very point of art, human expression, is the human part—to know that we all share a collective existence, confessing how awe-inspiring it is that a life can branch in so many different and unique ways, one being no more important than another, is indeed what storytelling is all about. Books are supposed to be looked at for their ideas, not revenue.
Besides, do we really want our children to know the stories of an AI’s mathematical approximation of what they think a story is? Support human-made books and reading.
“Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience….Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we’re doing, is not the only possibility.”
-Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006), Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
