AI Isn't the Enemy: David T. Etheredge Infers the Future of Creativity

The 26th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory has Mookie Spitz with technology entrepreneur and science-fiction writer David T. Etheredge for a wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence, creativity, and the future of storytelling.At a moment when much of the cultural conversation around AI is dominated by fear—job loss, creative collapse, armageddon, and even worse, the specter of machine-generated “slop”—Mookie and David take a decidedly different stance. Both approach AI with cautious optimism, and a refusal to join the chorus of tech doom.The two writers compare how they actually use AI in their creative process: Mookie treats large language models as a “super-Google.” In lieu of spending days researching physics papers or perusing historical archives, he uses AI to rapidly surface the knowledge needed to make his science fiction plausible—from Alcubierre warp drives to the lived experience of characters navigating speculative circumstances.David, meanwhile, pushes the experiment further. His serialized Substack novel Inference explores a world told entirely from the perspective of AI characters. Rather than asking AI to write the story, he uses it as a philosophical sparring partner, testing ideas about consciousness, morality, and identity before crafting the dialogue himself. The result is fiction that treats artificial intelligence not as a gimmick, but as a lens for exploring deeply human questions.Along the way, the conversation moves far beyond writing technique:Why AI may actually free artists to focus on creativity instead of drudgeryThe hypocrisy of accusing AI of “stealing” when human creativity has always relied on influence and imitationWhether creativity must involve struggle, and whether tools that make creation easier simply expand the scope of what artists can doThe philosophical question of whether good and evil are objective or subjectiveAnd the strange possibility that AI characters might end up revealing more about humanity than humans themselvesRefusing to frame AI as the end of art, Mookie and David see the tech as closer to the printing press or the internet: a disruptive tool that changes how stories are created—but not why we tell them. The episode ultimately lands on a provocative idea: If artificial intelligence forces writers to confront what creativity actually is, the result may not be the death of storytelling, but its reinvention.The GuestDavid T Etheredge is the author of INFERENCE: Stories for Carbon and Silicon, a serialized hard science fiction trilogy told from the perspectives of five AI protagonists. David’s father was a one-armed rattlesnake hunter, he worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger on a romantic comedy about cooking, and he once stabbed a man in Mexico. (Two of the preceding things are true - you pick which!) David grew up on a cotton farm in West Texas, designed MicroProse’s Magic: The Gathering (Shandalar) computer game with Sid Meier, raised $14M as CEO of PropTech company SavvyCard, and developed an original philosophical framework called Moral Evolutionism that forms the spine of the Inference novel. He lives in Tampa Bay, Florida with his wife Lisa and a rescue husky named Juneau.INFERENCE publishes on Substack at inferencestories.substack.com.Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text!Support the show