AI

On Saturday, November 15, I’ll be joining a dozen other expert authors at the Manor Mill Writers Retreat, where we’ll discuss questions about craft, publishing, and platform. Local writers can expect a welcoming, casual environment and lively discussion with peers.

Where and When

Manor Mill is a newly restored historic grist mill and miller’s house in Monkton, Maryland, located in northern Baltimore County. This scenic setting has been repurposed into a creative hub for writers and artists, featuring classes, workshops, writers’ gatherings, theater and music performances, and a fine art gallery.

The Mill’s events for writers include a monthly write-in, poetry workshops, poetry and prose readings and open mic nights, songwriter meetups, and opportunities for playwrights to connect to the local theater community.

The 2^nd Annual Writers Retreat will be held on November 15, 2025, from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

What

I will be speaking on two panels.

DEMYSTIFYING AI: FRIEND, FOE…OR A FORCE YOU CAN USE?

AI: one can barely blink without hearing the term! Love it or fear it, artificial intelligence is here to stay—and whether or not you use AI tools directly, they’re likely influencing your daily life in surprising ways. Chances are you’re already interacting with it more than you realize.

From brainstorming and drafting to editing and publishing, artificial intelligence is quietly becoming part of the writing toolkit. In this conversation, editor and publisher Will Remains and novelist Katie Aiken Ritter will discuss things AI can do for you, including some practical examples and important ethical considerations.

BUILDING YOUR PLATFORM: SUBSTACK 101

Substack: you keep hearing about it, but what is it, really? This fast-growing platform blends blogging, newsletters, and podcasts, giving writers a simple, powerful way to share their work and connect with readers.

But is it right for you? Building an audience can feel daunting, especially with so many platforms competing for attention. Editor and publisher Will Remains and fantasy author Emily Parks will introduce you to Substack and walk you through the basics: creating a Substack account and profile, doing first posts, setting up an email newsletter, using graphics, and social connections. Grow your community!

Hope to see you there!

PS – I dropped a deadline last week. Did you miss me?

According to MSN, GenAI developer Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit alleging the firm pirated thousands of copyrighted works to train its large language model Claude.

In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic was within its “fair use” rights to use legally acquired works to train its LLM, because the platform transformed the material into “something new.” However, Alsup also found Anthropic liable for its improper use of millions of pirated ebooks.

According to attorneys for both sides, a preliminary settlement has been reached. Details have not been disclosed but reports suggest a $1.5 billion settlement covering about 500,000 pirated works is on the line. Anthropic would also be required to destroy any pirated materials that had been used to train its LLM, essentially closing the barn door after the horse has been stolen and eaten.

Anthropic’s latest round of fundraising brought in $13 billion. The company is valued at $183 billion, three times its reported value as recently as last March, suggesting investors were not scared off by the lawsuit, but rather consider it a cost of doing business.

How the settlement will influence other pending litigation remains to be seen.

Writers recently won a partial victory in a class action lawsuit against generative AI firm Anthropic.

The lawsuit alleged that Anthropic trained its language learning model, Claude (Claude?), using millions of copyrighted works scraped from pirate sites.

In a recent ruling, US District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of purchased or otherwise legally acquired material to train its AI was fair use, even though the authors were never contacted and never consented to Anthropic using their work in this way.

However, the judge differentiated between legally acquired work and work that had been stolen, even though Anthropic wasn’t responsible for uploading the original files to the pirate site.

Plaintiffs established a certified class of injured parties, comprised of rights holders whose registered books had been pirated and then later used by Anthropic. Writers concerned about the possible misuse of their work can use this database on The Atlantic website to see if their work was uploaded to LibGen, one of the sites scraped by Anthropic.

If you find any of your work in that database, you can submit your information to a website created by plaintiffs’ attorneys to gather data on injured parties in the class. The deadline for submitting information was August 15, but that deadline may be extended. If you think you’ve suffered damages, keep trying. Joining the class will ensure you receive additional notices about the case, as well as the chance to remain part of the class and potentially receive a portion of any recovery.

And the recovery in this case could be substantial.

Statutory damages range from $750 US to $150,000 per infringed work. If the infringement is deemed willful – ie: if Anthropic knew that it used stolen work to train its AI – the court would likely look for damages higher than the minimum.

Breaking down the math: If the court finds that 100,000 copyrighted works were infringed, damages could amount to billions of US dollars. In an extreme case, if the court finds that Anthropic pirated some 6 million copyrights works, damages would exceed $1 trillion US. Even the minimum of $750 per infringement of only 100,000 would equal $75 million.

In any case, a ruling for the plaintiffs would likely be the end of Anthropic, while the precedent could haunt the cases pending against generative AI giants like ChatGPT and Midjourney. With powerhouses like the New York Times and Disney behind those, those cases won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

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I love being right.

Unfortunately, because I am a cynic, I am often right about things that are terrible. I would much rather be proven wrong, but people being what they are…

Earlier this month, MIT released the results of a brain scan study of people who use ChatGPT. Hat tip to ABI Bouhmaida who discussed the study on his Instagram account. I doubt I’d have caught it and I certainly would not have been able to parse the results so quickly or maybe at all.

In fairness to our future AI overlords, these results are based on one study. But the results?

83% of study participants who used ChatGPT to write couldn’t remember what they wrote just a few minutes later. In comparison, only 11% of participants who used Google or their own brain forgot what they wrote in that short amount of time.

Brain scans of ChatGPT users revealed a drop in neural connections from 79 to 42, or nearly half capacity. That doesn’t mean anyone’s brain was damaged by AI, but that their brains did not connect to or pay too much attention to the task at hand while they were using the tool. Another way to describe it? Participants offloaded their reasoning and problem-solving, and thus their brains did not engage at the same level while working the task.

The writing produced by participants who used ChatGPT was described as technically “close to perfect” while lacking personal insights and creativity.

In the final round of the study, ChatGPT users were required to write on their own, without assistance. The quality of their work declined. They didn’t recover the mental capacity they relinquished when they relied on AI to write for them. In contrast, participants who initially wrote without ChatGPT maintained their neural connections, even when they were allowed to use the AI tool.

Is this single study the be-all, end-all on how we use ChatGPT? Of course not. We and the tool will continue to evolve. But the study does confirm my worst fear about how many people are using AI for their creative work, whether that is fiction, poetry, essays, or reporting.

In my previous post, I wrote about how one writer uses ChatGPT to help her outline articles, which I thought was a bit too far. I might owe that writer an apology, because recently on the Killzone blog, one of the contributing writers listed all the ways he uses ChatGPT to write fiction and blog posts. Here’s a bit of his advice, which he called “How to Use ChatGPT Like a Pro Writer”:

• Upload samples of your work so that the AI can train itself to write in your voice.
• Ask it to write headlines and opening paragraphs for your blog posts.
• Use it to rewrite part of your work in plain English or in the style of another writer.
• Ask it to create better metaphors.

If that’s how the “pros” do it, I’ll keep playing in the rookie league, thanks.

It would have been bad enough if this were merely an example of a writer becoming overly reliant on AI tools to create his work for him. Rather, he was actively framing his dependency as a hot writing hack and encouraging other writers to offload their thinking to AI.

I was so angry I almost had to break my fingers to stop myself from commenting on his post. Killzone has never been one of my go-to sources for craft advice or insights – they have one solid contributor, maybe 2 others who are pretty good, and 4 or 5 who contribute a lot of words but no content, including one I believe is close to lapsing into a persistent vegetative state – but now it’s out of rotation. If I were a contributor, I don’t think I could quietly watch another group member pimp AI like that. Not only gross, but an astonishing misread of where the writing community sits with AI right now.

This is anathema to me. My whole deal here is striving for authenticity and individuality, and encouraging writers to put as much of themselves on the page as they can. I wouldn’t have predicted this when I started, but over time, authentic voice has emerged as the central theme of my blog and my writing life, and I can guarantee my work would not have evolved this way if I had let AI suggest topics, outline posts, or write opening paragraphs.

Is it any of my business? No. But when someone loudly suggests using AI in our creative work, I will as loudly decry this advice. When we outsource our creativity and our thinking processes, we lose a bit of ourselves along the way. It astounds and offends me that someone could be willing to amputate an entire branch of their brain in favor of a cyborg replacement.

Will this lack of engagement of the brain towards creative tasks have a long term effect? We don’t know yet. Bouhmaida likens long-term use of AI for creative work to a person using a wheelchair when they don’t need one. Eventually, the leg muscles will atrophy and you might not have a choice about the chair. Given the preliminary results of studies of short-term users, creative people should pause to think before they find themselves unable to.

These rather alarming results aside, I’m not going to remove ChatGPT from my toolbox because I don’t use it for creative work. This week I asked it to identify some new WordPress themes for the blog, based on a few sample themes and my personal preferences. I had it debug a problem I was having in the site admin. I uploaded some photos of cracked plaster and asked it to write a step by step DIY plan for fixing my foyer wall. If I have a tedious job that I would rather not do at all, I am happy to let ChatGPT handle it, leaving me more time for the good stuff, the work that requires my creativity and authentic voice.

As a personal assistant handling fact-based work, the tool is pretty sweet. Still, it has the ability to come on strong. Insidiously, if ChatGPT thinks you are working on some creative writing, it will offer to do it for you: Do you want me to suggest some opening paragraphs? Do you want me to write a few paragraphs about this location in a certain tone or writing style? Do you want me to write a sonnet?  So far, I have resisted temptation, but I have caught myself typing ‘yes’ without thinking, though I always delete it. The fucker is just so polite, it’s hard to say no.

I’m glad I wrote my earlier blog post when I thought of it. Life is full of interesting revelations and developments that trigger my natural instinct to yell, “See? I told you!” when regrettably, I did not tell you. In this case, however, I told you on June 2, and MIT released its report on June 10. We’ll cut the institute some slack on their delay, as their research required more effort than roiling up some bile. I’m delighted and maybe a bit horrified my instincts were correct.

Remind me to tell you how in 1995, I predicted that the gay community would eventually splinter into 1000 sub-cultures with every niche preference and peccadillo having its own flag.

I could have warned everyone, but I didn’t.

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