Robot Writers
Many people love writing. That might be an understatement, but it’s too true. There are endless authors and novelists out there, all grinding away on their latest manuscripts. There’s something beautiful about that.
A lot of people even have a little novel project on the side. It’s not just authors. Anyone could be writing a novel: journalists, English teachers, that guy who was mumbling to himself in the corner of the Starbucks, everyone’s got their own projects going on.
That singular fact is beautiful. That so many human beings are passionate about their own little writing ventures.
Which is why I find the idea of AI doing that so utterly disgusting. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate the idea of AI. It’s the fact that some people are using it for writing that icks me.
Reiteration: I’m fine with people asking it for terms or whatnot, but using it to write just for you? I find that preposterous. Where’s the emotion? Where’s the late-night work being poured into it? Where’s the frantic discussion with your friends about the plot at the local Dunkin Donuts? There’s no passion, no love of a work, no sense of accomplishment when a machine spits out a script for you. Where’s the cradling of a book, baby? Where’s your holding hand as you and perhaps some other people attempt to guide it into greatness? My God, is there no justice?
Ever hear the axiom “It’s all about the journey, not the destination?” Where’s the “journey” in having ChatGPT write for you? Taking four seconds to write a prompt for a machine?
Alright. Tangent over. Time to get realistic.
While I’d really like to say that AI won’t take over writing completely, there’s an ever growing mass of evidence against that. You can see that for yourself. If you used ChatGPT when it first dropped, and you start it up now, you can tell that it’s vastly improved. It has access to almost the entire internet, which means more bits and pieces to thatch together into both fiction and nonfiction writing. The scary thing is, I recently asked ChatGPT to write me a story, and then I plugged said story into multiple AI detectors to see if any of them would pick it up.
I put the story into maybe eight detectors.
Only one of them realized that it was AI. The rest were all comically certain that it was 100% human writing.
So AI creative writing has already started to bypass our detection systems. What about nonfiction?
Nonfiction is so much easier. Generally, with a story, you can sort of tell whether or not there’s a voice behind it. You can sense the emotions through the words written. With nonfiction, its tone is already halfway there, its voice already robotic in its listing of facts and description of events. There’s not exactly a lot of room for creativity when you’re trying to write a history passage.
Although AI has vastly improved in both fiction and nonfiction writing, I have reason to believe that the former will stay, if not completely, then mostly human. After all, if a robot has written it, what’s the point? Then everyone could just type a prompt whenever they want to read fiction. After all (so far, anyway), the best human writings have come from actual humans. Of course, using AI to help is a different story. I don’t really have a stance on that yet, but perhaps it could be helpful in the long run.
If AI is on track to take over fiction writing, though, there’s something we can all do: Stop using AI to write. What’s the point if you’re not doing it yourself?
