Hello, and happy 2026!

I hope the year is starting off well for you. Of course, there’s a lot going on the world right now. Much of it not very positive. But this is where we all get the chance to step up and be counted when it counts, right?

Before I jump into my main topic, I wanted to let you know that I’m participating in this collection of current and upcoming romantic suspense Kickstarter campaigns. It’s a small, tightly focused group, so if it sounds like your thing, check it out! I’ve already backed one of the campaigns.

I made the graphic and that’s supposed to be Rowena running away from the bad guys (why not do some self-promo if you’re doing most of the work, right?). By “made the graphic,” I mean that I took a stock photo and did some stuff in Photoshop and InDesign to turn it into a banner.

The stock photo caused me some soul-searching, because it had a “generative AI” tag on it. At this point, most of the stock images I’ve looked at have “generative AI” tags, and the ones that don’t were obviously made with GAI, just less well than the ones made by professionals. This caused me a certain amount of doubt and mental anguish, since I try to avoid using stuff that’s been made by GAI for a variety of reasons, including the possibility of ending up on the wrong end of a lawsuit one day. However, it is rapidly becoming ubiquitous.

And, of course, there’s the psychological/sci fi horror story that I’m cowriting that was inspired by a friend’s brush with AI psychosis. Instead of deleting the guilty chatbot, she decided to write a terrifying story about him (“him”!) and using some of his (“his”!) responses in the text. So if/when we succeed in publishing this tale of terror, I will be the author of a work co-written with GAI.

What about you? What’s your thoughts on GAI? Do you use it regularly, and if so, for what? Opinions on it are so divided and divisive that it’s hard to get a sense of how most people actually feel about it. For me, so far it’s mainly been a scourge that has required me to radically redo most of my assessments in order to forestall widespread cheating of the most baldfaced sort. Frankly, I’m an AI pessimist. But the future is, well, the future and therefore inherently difficult to predict.

Let me know what you think, and here’s that link for the Kickstarter collection again!