Writing in the Age of AI, Plus Boutique Humanity

In which we write our squishy, organic hearts out

I.

At the time of writing this, the Writers Guild of America’s strike has passed the one-month mark, which is long enough to give it its own Wikipedia page. The main issue at stake is fair compensation. With the great shift of media to streaming platforms, most writers are, at least in part, paid via so-called residuals. (A recommended read for much more about this is Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.)

While I don’t know the specifics about how those residuals are calculated, this Reuters article notes that:

Half of TV series writers now work at minimum salary levels, compared with one-third in the 2013-14 season, according to Guild statistics. Median pay for scribes at the higher writer/producer level has fallen 4% over the last decade.

Add ridiculous price hikes for food and energy, and I would say that the writers are right in claiming that they are woefully underpaid.

(Here’s another, more philosophical worry about subscription-based streaming platforms I wrote about earlier.)

The residuals are only part of the worry, though. It will surprise exactly zero of you that AI text generators are looming large over the strike as well. Creative writers of all stripes are increasingly faced with clients or employers that see a chance to cut costs by having more and more writing done by ChatGPT and its kids. These writers are concerned that the day will soon arrive when they are hired only to edit AI-generated text rather than actually writing. And trust me, for some ChatGPT texts - especially when it concerns more creative types of writing - a lot of editing is needed.

Fun fact: companies pay less for editing than for copywriting.

I am fortunate in that I am not (yet?) replaced by AI junk in my main job, but through the grapevine of people who linger more in freelance land, I am very aware that his day has already arrived for many writers.

Bestselling author Chuck Wendig recently wrote about the current challenges in the publishing landscape and - you guessed it - AI is a big one. In his words:

… publishers are starting to go “hmm” about artificial intelligence, under the auspices of how it could somehow enrich the authorial experience when, in reality, they and we all know that the only enrichment will be in the pockets of the already-rich. (Spoiler: I don’t mean the authors.) Some executive somewhere is trying to figure out how they pay authors less (and maybe their own staff) by “augmenting” the “content” with “artificial intelligence.”

See fun fact earlier.

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Read more about gray goo content and why current AI text generators are like a dead horse. Also, if you feel inspired to support an idiosyncratic human writer…

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II.

So, here we are, in a budding new world where executives (including those of AI generator developing companies) can’t wait to cut human costs and outsource actual creativity to get a terribly misguided caricature in its place. Not that they would put it this way. No, as author and professor Naomi Klein wonderfully writes in this recent Guardian essay:

Generative AI will end poverty, they [AI execs] tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. These, I fear, are the real AI hallucinations…

There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own…

And that is the crux, isn’t it? The utopian ideal of AI taking over tedious tasks, of AI making our lives easier, has shattered in the face of a reality in which - on a societal level - profit prevails over people.

Don’t get me wrong; I think AI can take over a lot of tedious work and can make life easier. In theory. I am also convinced that, as Klein points out, in our current socioeconomic systems, most AI text and image generators will be used by employers to reduce the number of people they have to pay and reduce the pay of people they decide to keep on. Or by content creators for generating a flood of stale content to bully engagement algorithms and make a quick buck.

From my vantage point near the cutting edge of biotech, I suspect machine learning will be massive in fields such as medicine, biotech, and materials science.

The generation of creative content, in my opinion, does not belong on that list. Should not belong on that list.

III.

*Bias alert goes off*

I like creative writing and writing creatively (not the same thing btw), which means that I have an instinctive negative reaction to AI-generated texts that mimic ‘creative’ writing. In other words, I am biased against it.

Let’s poke that bias. Why do I feel uncomfortable with the notion of AI generators taking over creative writing (beyond that it often still sucks donkey balls)?

• The joy of creation. I like to play with words and ideas. Writing lets me do both. I like fiddling with words until sentences become semantic satyrs dancing through fictional forests. (Let a chatbot generate that sentence, huh?). Outsourcing creative writing to chatbots steals that joy from human writers who are already having a hard enough time as it is.

• Emotional resonance. You will often hear people who choose to dedicate some of their free time to writing say that writing is a form of therapy. Especially fiction is a proven way to tap into our shared humanity and create emotional resonance between readers and writers. We all want connection, and relying on chatbots to create it will, at best, be a forgery and, at worst, emotional (self-)abuse.

• Voluntary effort. Why do people run marathons when you can simply take a car? Because running that marathon represents years of training and discipline. It represents a goal and the dedication to that goal. I spend time and effort on this newsletter and on writing short stories, even though I could ask ChatGPT. It would not be ‘me’, but it would probably be better for engagement by simply switching to a quantity strategy and cutting away the weirdest parts. But I choose to invest time and effort in this for the reasons mentioned above (explore ideas, forge connections, ‘create’ something...). I try to convince myself that the effort has some value. It doesn’t take effort from a chatbot, only copyright infringement and greenhouse gas production.

There are probably more things I could add to the list, but I’ll keep it at three.

Creative writing, in other words, is about more than the words. The words are merely the surface level of immeasurable depths of personal experience, anguish, and awe, of grinding thoughts and wrestling concepts, of sparkling ideas and glitters of joy. Authentic human writing is valuable precisely because it is human. Read that again.

By relegating it to software tools that scour already published texts to create statistically likely sentences, those intangibles of human creative writing are invalidated and devalued.

Or, in the words of author Ted Chiang (whose work you should definitely check out) in this recent Financial Times article:

Language is a way of facilitating interactions with other beings. That is entirely different than the sort of next-token prediction, which is what we have [with AI tools] now.

But hey, I’m biased.

Let’s end with a duo of related predictions.

Prediction one: the generative AI genie is out of the bottle and I don’t think we can put it back. Even if, say, the EU gets its act together and comes with a set of rules (which they’ll enforce how exactly?) for AI generator development, there are other places developers can go. A different example: the number one search result for Dutch baroque painter Johannes Vermeer on Google Images is… an AI-generated ‘painting’ (may have been fixed by the time your read this). These are the first glimpses of a future in which AI tools generate content for mass consumption, disregarding copyright, creativity, and accuracy.

Prediction two: despite prediction one, human creative writing isn’t going anywhere. For some people, writing is about much more than money. It will, however, become more of a luxury item in terms of ‘consumption’. AI-generated (creative) writing is like a mall that has everything to suit your needs. Bland, and based on relatively similar templates, but enough to scratch what itches you. Human-generated writing will become more like an exclusive boutique with bespoke, lovingly crafted texts. Sadly, not everyone has the resources and network to set up or visit a boutique, which suggests that creative writing for a living will stop being an option for a lot of people.

The future is fundamentally weird and unpredictable, so I might be entirely wrong. And yes, software tools can enhance human creativity and self-expression, but the way AI generators are mostly used now is to fully outsource the ‘creative’ part of the process. (Generate and create are not too different, after all.) For me, the intention to create and the act of creation have value, both intrinsically and extrinsically.

But there is a little ray of hopeful moonlight left. Until the algorithms take over fully, you still have some control over what you (don’t) consume. You - yes, you - can still decide to support human creativity and human creatives. Find those authors and artists whose work you enjoy, especially those that don’t have a massive audience (yet). Buy their stuff, subscribe to their things, and/or spread the word, which is one of the main drivers of support for people not already on bestseller lists. And, of course, go and create yourself.

I am far from an anti-technology grumbler shaking his angry fist at an iron sky. Quite the opposite. And I think that large language models and other AI-based applications have many good uses, but devaluing the time, effort, and emotion intrinsic to human creative expression is not one of them.

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Hey, thanks human (?) reader. Thinking Ahead is a reader-supported effort and I appreciate you taking the time to stop by.