I am not a fan of AI being used for creative endeavours. Generative AI, I guess, is the catch-all term for when people use Large Language Models to turn portraits into Studio Ghibli cartoons, or write a poem, or rejig a song in a new genre, or do something else to remove the humanity from artistic expression.
Obviously I have a bias in this regard. In a purely technical, unemotional sense, I have a vested interest in maintaining the value of human-crafted artistic expression. Because I’m a human artist, so of course I do.
But I do, genuinely, think that AI generated “art” is unfit for purpose. Ignoring that I don’t think the technology is there yet, the truth is that I don’t think it will ever be fit for purpose. Mass-production is spectacular for economies, but nobody has ever described a McDonalds burger as “the best”. Not without addendums. It’s “the best burger you can get that quickly”, or “the best burger at that price”, or “the best burger you can get at 1am after a night out on the piss”.
The thing is, it’s not trying to be the best burger full stop. Depending on the McDonalds location you visit, it may not be trying to fulfill any of the other categories listed.
“The best” isn’t really a category that mass production is trying to attain—most of the time, they’re aiming for a “Minimum Viable Product” because it satisfies quality standards while minimising costs. It’s the same with Generative AI. Industrialisation of Art isn’t going to make good products, just a lot of them. A lot of minimum viable products, all of them just barely satisfying the requirements while minimising costs (in this the currency saved being ‘time’, while we ignore staggering environmental costs).
And I don’t want that. I want books written by real people. Even if I don’t like them, I want songs made by real people. Visual art made by humans. I think it’s worth the “extra” cost. Because that price is… making art. It’s joyful. Sometimes work is work, but more often than not crafting something to elicit an emotional reaction from other people is exhilarating, and I think it comes through when an artist is having fun.
Which brings me to my point. Wordplay is, ironically, the greatest weapon in a writer’s arsenal against Generative AI. I worry constantly that my writing is going to be mistaken for AI, mostly because I use emdashes a lot.
But a study from the University of Venice and Cardiff University published late last year demonstrated that Puns are an excellent way to demonstrate the humanity in writing, because LLMs are still broadly incapable of understanding wordplay.
I recommend reading the paper, but the short of it is that puns require an understanding of language that LLMs do not currently possess. Heterographic puns—based on words that sound the same but are spelled differently—are particularly difficult, because LLMs do no ‘hear’, they simply process words as chunks. The paper also performed a variety of adversarial swaps with puns that laid bare the truth at the heart of LLM ‘understanding’—many LLMs continue to be complex predictive text systems that possess no genuine comprehension of the words they generate, just that those words regularly follow others.
Which means if you want to make sure people know your story wasn’t written by AI, you should write one with a lot of puns.
Hell, you should do it anyway. Puns are fun! They’re literally called wordplay. They’re the equivalent of Steph Curry making full court shots during warm-ups before a game.
I guess what I’m pitching is becoming a Harlem GlobeTrotter.
I’ve already started. You might recall a short story I wrote called The Robot Butler Did It. It ends on the best kind of pun, a terrible one. That story featured just the one pun, although it was densely layered with many other cultural references that a discerning reader might puzzle out.
Well, I wrote a sequel. A Shore Thing contains many puns, but—and you’ll see this when you read it—it’s also an exploration of the nature of wordplay as a foil for LLMs in general. It features Inspector Loggins and his sceptical off-sider Detective Thestage again as they try to solve yet another dastardly murder in a future where robots and AIs of varying capability exist alongside humans.
I wrote the story for a Reedsy Prompts competition with the prompt: Write a story that includes (or is inspired by) the phrase “Almost is never enough” or “So close, yet so far.” I obviously fulfill my obligation to that requirement, although I will say I think the explicitly inclusion of the prompt hurts the story more than it helps. I was worried if I didn’t include the words specifically I would find myself disqualified, but I find the phrase specifically on the nose.
Which I guess is a little ironic, considering some of the puns I wrote.
Anyway, that’s it. Write puns into your stories to prove you’re not an AI!
Joabyjojo 
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