Ethics and AI
Goldman, Mahkno, and a guy from Star Wars walk into a bar....
If you’ve been here before, t’s good to see you again. If you’re new here, I’m John, and this is The Writer’s Secret Weapon, where I talk about things in writing and publishing to help tell your stories.
Today I have something to say about a topic loads of other people have already talked about.
The Big Giant Toolbox
AI is a tool. And like any tool, the intellectually lazy, the creative dishonest, and the capitalist bootlicker will make a crutch out of it, hide behind it, and abuse it.
That’s the easy part. Every writer with a hot take has already said that. The harder part is what comes next.
Here’s the thing about having opinions about something: it’s intellectually dishonest to argue against something you have no experience with. I couldn’t stand outside AI, shake my fist at it, and write about its damage to the craft while having never touched it. That would have been the real dishonesty. So I tried it for a weekend. It sat there on my phone and I learned what it actually does. And now I can tell you what I actually think.
It’s a tool. And I think it has its uses, but people abuse the hell of it and ask it to help them walk on water.
Do I think it should be used to write in place of a person? No. Art is what we make to express ourselves and asking anyone or anything else to make our art means we’re not expressing ourselves.
Do I think you can use it to sort through ideas? Sure. I asked it to rank 4 brands of office supplies based on some criteria I supplied. It recommended a brand of pens I already use. That’s neat.
Everything that makes me who I am and lets me do what I do, that’s all me. There’s no AI touching any part of it. No Grammarly. No prompts swiped off a social media feed. This is how I sound all the time and this all comes from me thinking out loud.
All these tools - the summation ones, the interrogative ones, the formatting ones - they all come with a genealogy of theft. Material was taken without consent or recognition from writers, artists, and musicians to train these models. And while that might make it easier to delegate a 9000 chapter to a machine or prompt your way through finishing your thoughts for you because you can’t be bothered to be creative, the fact is that you have to question your complicity in creative burglary every time you fire up Claude or GPT or whatever-else to make a thing you were going to make otherwise.
So good for you for having tools. Good for you for using them, but know what you’re getting into.
The modern Tiflis robbery
The anarchist position I keep coming back to, the one that’s been in my bones since I was a freshman in college is that all information should be accessible and free. No gatekeepers. No gods. No masters. Just access to things so that all people can be all the things they want to be to whatever degree they want to be. There is no truly owned private property, and that includes intellectual property. So am I complicit in theft because AI uses stolen words, if the words can’t be owned in the first place? What if this is all a capitalist fiction from the capitalist system that built the machine that stole them?
Stalin robbed the bank to fund the Bolsheviks and the bank had money from people who could barely afford to keep any in the bank.
Am I a thief or am I comrade for seeing AI as a tool and not the enemy outright because AI might also be an assistive device to help people communicate and express themselves while it kills the planet using stolen art?
I don’t have a clean answer. I have this wound, but not because the work was used. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The minute something is read it belongs to the reader. They can interpret it, share it, carry it, synthesize it, reject it, whatever. That’s what publishing is.
The wound is erasure. The work was used to build something worth billions, and the people whose words got used weren’t told or consulted, never paid and never named. The taking isn’t the injury. The anonymizing is.
Emma Goldman would tell you the problem isn’t AI - it’s that you’re surprised the capitalist system built a capitalist tool. It’s what they do. Leopards and spots. Of course it extracted labor without our consent. Of course the masters got rich while the workers get nothing other than a front row to a new climate where the rich get richer and workers fight for fewer scraps. The question was never to use the tool or not. The question is whether you’re using the tool to reinforce or undermine the system you’re a part of.
Nestor Mahkno would be less philosophical, more tactical. He’d say the tool is in your hands now, so what do you want to do with it? The Black Army didn’t refuse to use captured Imperial weapons, they turned the guns around on the people they got them from. Stop wringing your hands about genealogy and ask only if you’re pointing at the right target.
The two of them would agree that writers demanding financial compensation are asking a landlord to negotiate a fairer rent. Which brings me to why I can’t back that position.
Who’s talking and what are they saying?
They’re not wrong for being angry. But accepting a check only tells people you can be bought off. That there’s a price to your art, and all someone’s gotta do is open their wallet. Once that price exists and is known, the argument is over. You’re a line item on a spreadsheet, you’re a solved problem. The moral claim becomes a commercial one and they’ll win because they play commercial games the way you and I breathe.
Demanding money speaks their language. It accepts their terms. It plays their game. It resists nothing. It complies. You play, you lose. They’ll always have more money than you. The game is rigged.
The more radical position is to refuse to let anything be defined in the enemy’s language at all.
There’s a case to be made for revolution begetting tyrants then begetting more revolutions. It’s a structural case. Liberation is a permanent condition, not a destination. You don’t arrive at freedom and then stop. The tyranny that grows from revolution isn’t the betrayal of the idea, it’s the next thing the idea has to fight. Mahkno knew this, which is why the Black Army fought everyone, not just the obvious opponents.
Check this cycle out: The writing establishment gets disrupted, that disruption becomes self-publishing, self-publishing gets colonized by the content apparatus, that apparatus gets absorbed by AI slop, and then we get a new writing establishment. Throughout this whole thing, there are writers who still want to make things right along side parasites and hacks and bootlickers who want to tie money and soullessness to art. The empire changes shape while the rebellion stays permanent.
Did someone say rebellion and Empire?
So, Andor. Nemik understood that the Empire’s real power isn’t the military. It’s that the Empire is great at making people believe resistance is impossible or pointless. The system wins when you internalize its logic, which for us it’s when you start writing for the algorithm or metrics or the market or whatever hell the people who call you “creative ninja rockstars” are doing. They win when you stop trusting that the thing you want to make is worth making unless there’s all this capitalism and sales-potential backing you up.
My whole business, everything I got on the line, everything I do and call myself a professional at something exists because I believe that what anyone makes is worth making because they want to make it, so why not make it the best you can and then go make the next thousand things even better. It’s the Rebellion of craft and art against the Empire of Business.
Traditional publishing, self-publishing optimized for keywords and tags, the content machine, the AI-driven drafting process all run on the same logic hamster wheel: do only what can be monetized because the only benchmark that matters is financial and commercial recognition. The well-trained, free-thinking, craft-solid writer is an insurgent.
Luthen says he’s condemned to use the tools of his enemies. The Empire’s weapons, the Empire’s networks. The Empire’s methods. Not because he loves them, but because the alternative is losing before he even starts.
My enemy
My enemy isn’t Claude or FucknutsAI. My enemy is publishing and the writing advice industries. The corporatocracy and the bloat and the criminal capitalism with all its sexism and racism and supremacy baked into which voices get amplified and which get silenced. The system was here before AI. AI is just a new tool wielded by many hands.
Use tools. Use them carefully. With your eyes open. With discomfort intact.
It doesn’t have to be a co-author. Or a publishing department. Or a six-person content farm. Or whatever the prompt bots tell you that AI can replace.
If you’re going to use it, be conscientious and informed. It won’t do the work for you, unless you’re willing to accept inferior work. And if you’re willing to accept inferior work, were you ever really committed to doing it in the first place?
The writers who come to me aren’t coming to me because they want a machine to do the work or express something on their behalf. They’re coming to me because they want to learn how to do it themselves. They want the craft. They want to know how to make the thing they see in their head turn into something that lives on a page. No machine can want that. That wanting is human. Expression is humanity.
I think the discomfort I feel is a feature not a bug in the tools. The people who use AI without friction are the ones who either haven’t done enough thinking or who don’t give a shit, and none of those people are my people.
Ennoble and Enable
The people who use the tools badly aren’t failing some abstract ethical test, they’re failing the specific responsibility any user of any tool has to ennoble and enable you. That’s true if we’re talking about chisels, pianos, saxophones, paintbrushes, footballs, ice skates, or AI. Using the tool to shrink, outsource, or perform work they can’t or won’t do turns the tool into a ceiling and not a door.
It doesn’t make things better. It just commodifies things differently.
We’re supposed to be expressing ourselves. We’re supposed to be digging deeper into ourselves and finding how we can connect to others through the things we imagine. Some tools facilitate that. Some tools retard that. Some tools give us the illusion of progress without actually accomplishing anything.
Keep your eyes open.
Love you. Talk soon.