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All right, I'll put in my two cents. You've heard enough about AI to not care about what I think of it, so I'm just going to tell you what happened during some of my forays into the land of artificial intelligence.
The first comes from a time before the whole thing exploded. From when my phone was still set to Dutch. So when I used Google maps to get me around my new home in the UK, the delightful Dutch woman's voice would direct me to all kinds of places I didn't recognise. In a way, I liked it, because I had to think about which place on the road signs she meant, meaning I learnt my way around quite quickly. But I did laugh out loud when she announced we would be passing Oath All instead of Oathall. I changed her to English quite soon after.
Once the 6-fingered people disappeared from AI images, I started playing around with them a little. Do not tell my husband, the digital artist... Obviously, his pictures are much better, but for a quick illustration to a newsletter item, the art doesn't need to be world class.
There are, however, some interesting restrictions. I wanted a picture of Julie, my sleuth from the Saint Maurice Mysteries, in her characteristic rockabilly dress. I'm not sure why, but all the women in the AI-generated images were black, and Julie is not. I asked for a white woman, but the generator wouldn't let me! So I asked for a French woman instead. Et voilá.
Another time, I tried to get it to make me an image of Jessica Rose's art from book 4, Sieste in Peace. Funnily enough, it couldn't do it. You know why? Because it was original. Which means AI couldn't find an example, and so it couldn't recreate what I told it the art looked like.
Just to illustrate, my prompt reflected the way the artwork is described in the book: a spiky blob of clay that looks like it has been punched and pulled at in anger. This is what it came up with:
Needless to say, I don't use AI for writing. Not even these little blog posts. I have tried to use it for research, but it's not allowed to hand me a list of ways to kill people... That's fine. Probably best. But if it won't help me with that, then I certainly won't let it do my fun work. My words are always my own. Because I kind of like what I have to say, and I'll say it in my own words.