Novenas & Novellas

Artificial Intelligence

AI Isn’t a Boogeyman

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you do realize you’re using data center resources every time you stream a movie or music, right?

To answer a recent meme, you also use a bottle of water every time you stream a two-hour movie. Do a marathon of eight episodes of your favorite show? Four bottles of water. Put Spotify on in your office for a workday? Two or three bottles of water. I can go on, but you get the idea.

Now, I’m not saying the concerns about data centers are misguided. They aren’t, and the advent of AI will demand the building of a lot more of them.

But here’s the deal. Some are already experimenting with ways to keep water consumption to a minimum. To possibly generate at least some of their own power. To be as light on the local environment as possible.

Writing and AI: Is It Really About Rights? Or Quality?

Writing

One of the largest debates about large language models (LLMs, imprecisely called “AI”) and authors has to do with rights: who owns what? Who consented to what? Are creators being fairly compensated? Those questions matter, and they’re not going away anytime soon. But the rights argument doesn’t explain the sheer intensity of the opposition to LLMs among authors, especially since there are plausible solutions available via tweaks to content licensing, copyright law, and compensation structures.

The other big argument centers around quality, but even that isn’t quite enough to explain the absolute fury I’ve seen in some quarters. Poor-quality writing has never been in short supply, and it has never posed a threat to high-quality writing, even though it has always existed in greater volume. Before now, though, it was largely treated as an annoyance. Authors ignored or avoided it (including, at times, looking down on those who self-published, but that’s a separate conversation).

As a writer who uses an LLM for developmental editing*, I’ve pondered why there seems to be such vehemence in its opposition. Ethics, rights, and quality aren’t minor issues — they’re very real and very important — but the emotionality of the reactions points to something more.

I suspect I know what that “something more” is: writers and non-writers alike expect writing to be hard. Anything that makes it easier is automatically suspect.

Using AI: Is it Caving? Hypocrisy? Or Just a Tool?

Writing

I mentioned in my last post that, during December 2025, I made a change to my writing process that has paid off in spades. It came after a lot of serious thought and consideration, but now that I’ve made the plunge, I can’t believe how much difference working with an AI has made.

There’s a lot of yelling and screaming out there, these days, about whether AI writing is “real writing,” and I should make one aspect of my position on the matter clear: if the writing itself is generated by AI, it’s not the author’s work. This is evidenced by the fact that, if text is solely written by generative AI, it cannot be copyrighted.

Further, I still fully agree that the use of copyrighted work to “train” a LLM is unethical if the author hasn’t given permission — and in my personal case, I have explicitly prohibited the use of my work for such purposes. This holds true even for my fan fiction, as certain aspects of fan fiction are, in fact, copyrightable to the author and not the source material’s creator (and thus, it is possible to plagiarize fan fiction).

So why did I “cave” and begin using AI?