As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more and more prevalent in all aspects of our lives, it is natural to be concerned about its impact on professional writers. AI writing software has the potential to revolutionize the way we write, but it can also pose some serious threats to professional writers.
The most obvious danger is the potential for AI writing software to replace human writers. AI can quickly generate content that is accurate, consistent and often of a higher quality than human writers can produce. This could put many professional writers out of a job, as companies may be more likely to use AI instead of human writers.
Another danger that AI poses to professional writers is the potential for mass produced, generic content. AI writing software can create content that is accurate and consistent, but it can lack creativity and originality. If AI writing software is used in place of human writers, the content produced may be of a lower quality and lack the creativity and originality that human writers bring to the table.
Finally, AI writing software can be used to manipulate the truth. AI can be programmed to generate content that is biased or even false. This could lead to a dangerous situation where readers are exposed to inaccurate information.
Overall, AI writing software has the potential to revolutionize the way we write, but it also poses some serious threats to professional writers. Companies should be aware of the potential dangers that AI poses to professional writers and should take steps to ensure that human writers are not replaced by AI.
The title of this blog post is the prompt that I entered into Canva’s new “Magic Write” feature. The content above the separator is what the AI software produced for me in literal seconds. I did not edit it or tweak it any way. All I created in my own was the original prompt.
I tried it with fiction, as well, using the prompt, “A battle between two spaceships from the POV of the hero, captain starvsgaard, with the fate of the galaxy at stake”:
Captain Starvsgaard stood on the bridge of his starship, the Paladin, looking out at the enemy vessel in the distance. He knew that the fate of the galaxy was in his hands. He had to win this battle or all would be lost.
He gave the order to charge the enemy vessel, and his crew responded with a resounding battle cry. The Paladin surged forward, its cannons blazing. The enemy ship retaliated with its own barrage of laser fire, and the two vessels clashed in a dazzling display of light and destruction.
The Paladin was smaller and faster, and it was able to dodge most of the enemy’s shots. But each time it returned fire, it was met with an even more powerful counterattack. It was a desperate fight, and it seemed like it could go either way.
But in the end, the Paladin emerged victorious. The enemy ship was destroyed, and the fate of the galaxy was saved. Captain Starvsgaard and his crew cheered in triumph. It was a moment of victory that they would never forget.
I added the words, “with dialogue between the captain and first mate” and ran it again:
Captain Starvsgaard stood on the bridge of the Empire’s flagship, the Phoenix, and looked out into the vastness of space. He could feel the tension in the air as the other ship, the Dark Star, loomed into view. The fate of the galaxy was in his hands, and he knew that only one of these ships would survive the battle.
“All hands, prepare for battle,” he said, his voice firm and strong. “We must not fail.”
The crew scrambled to their stations, and the Phoenix began to move into position. Captain Starvsgaard glanced at his first mate, Lt. Johansson.
“This is it,” he said calmly. “Let’s show them what we’re made of.”
Lt. Johansson nodded, a determined look on her face. “Yes, sir. We will not fail.”
The two ships closed in on each other, and soon the battle was raging. Laser blasts flew through the air, and the two ships rocked and shook from the impact of the explosions.Captain Starvsgaard watched from the bridge, his hands gripping the sides of his chair tightly. He could feel the energy of the battle, and he knew that this was a battle for the fate of the galaxy.
“Fire at will!” he shouted, as the Phoenix fired its lasers, causing the Dark Star to shudder. “We will not be defeated!”
The battle raged on, and soon the Dark Star was in ruins, the crew surrendering. Captain Starvsgaard smiled, knowing that they had won.
He turned to Lt. Johansson. “Well done, Lt. We have saved the galaxy.”
Lt. Johansson smiled back, her eyes bright with pride. “Yes, sir. We have.”
I think what I find the most worrying about these results is the way that the artificial intelligence filled in gaps in the details. I didn’t provide a name for the first mate or the ships. I didn’t say what kind of dialogue I wanted, I just said “dialogue.” Yet from those very simple prompts I got something that isn’t up to my standards for publication, but is light years ahead of some of the things currently being published.
AI generated text first pinged my scam radar when Facebook ads for a service meant to boost author marketing made AI generated text a selling point: pay for our service and you will be able to create more blog content and more social media content without sacrificing time that you could be using to write your books. Since I’m currently watching all of my artist friends beg people not to use fantasy portrait generators on social media that are so sloppy in their art theft as to leave the original artists’ signatures visible in the AI generated final product, I decided that this was something I should keep my eye on.
Just two weeks later, an author on TikTok showed up on my FYP extolling the virtues of AI writing software. It was boosting her word count so much faster. Helping her break her writing block. And there was absolutely no thought, at least, in the video, as to the impact or ethics of using AI generated content in your published work.
The comments on the video were all rapture. People discussed how this could be used for world building (based on the excerpts above, I’m thinking the answer to that is “not effectively”), for writing newsletter entries, for taking care of scenes you were having trouble with or were simply bored of and wanted to get past in your manuscript.
In other words, every single author in those comments was excited about the new ways they were going to defraud their readers.
Publishers and indie authors have already been caught using AI generated images on covers. Currently, Harper Collins is still on strike and unwilling to cave to such unreasonable demands as ” please pay us” and “we’d like it if you would hire some not-white people.” So far in all of my experiments that I’ve run with AI generated text, the prose has been technically clean, meaning there is some type of editing brain happening in the artificial intelligence. Traditional publishing won’t need authors or editors moving forward. This current strike might be the last one we see in the industry; there simply won’t be humans to object to unethical practices in the home offices.
It didn’t surprise me to see that most of the authors celebrating AI generated text without a single thought as to the long-term consequences were indie authors. Write faster, cleaner, with minimum effort is awfully attractive to a writer who only cares about generating book after book “for the algorithm,” with quality control as an afterthought. The potential for success and profit as a self-published author has attracted that wrong sort of “writer” into indie circles, creating pockets of authors who view their work as a craft and not a cheap product, and pockets of authors who are constantly looking to make a quick buck, for whom creating rich and interesting stories is the chore they would most like to eliminate from their writing career.
When it comes to AI generated text, the latter will profit from the work of the former. When I entered those prompts into Canva’s Magic Write feature, it wasn’t an imagination behind those words. It was a memory of millions of pages of content, billions of already written words that were created by hundreds of thousands of actual human brains through hard work and true inspiration. Hard work and true inspiration that get-rich-quick, rapid fire indies and traditional publishing houses can’t produce on their own, either.
Now, they’re one giant leap closer to cutting out the human element entirely and profiting on plagiarism in a bigger, bolder way than they already do. Every sentence in that AI generated content came from a human brain. It was merely collected and organized, without proper credit or citation, into a marketable product. The writers who did the actual work? Who cares about them?
It will be interesting to see how far AI generated text infiltrates fiction writing. All it will really take is one viral sensation that ” gets people back into reading” and the game is over.
The usual “a rising tide” argument will be made by the “support your fellow authors, you jealous hater!” crowd. I’m curious to see which big name author will get caught using AI first. No doubt, their Teflon status will create overwhelming public support from fellow authors who’ll enthusiastically champion a cause that will cost them their jobs, just so long as they can stay in favor with whoever the reigning monarch of the industry is at the time. Whether readers deserve better quality for their money has never been a concern for publishers and indie fast-profit seekers, anyway, and it certainly won’t be a factor now.
We will see the “just a fast writer” defense, so often employed to deny that authors publishing five to six books a month are doing so with the help of ghost writers, plastered all over social media. And everyone will become a legal expert in copyright law and plagiarism in order to silence critics. As long as you conflate the concepts of legality and morality to obfuscate the issue, anyone can be absolved of outright theft if they’re in with the right crowd. Being able to blame a computer all but guarantees the ethical arguments against plagiarism will be drowned out with cries of “jealousy!”
If I sound bleak here, it’s because I’m a realist with far too much experience in the industry to believe that AI text is going to take the writing community anywhere good. The playbook for defending unethical actions within the writing community has been revised to perfection in our age of social media; the perfect spin for the deceptive use of this groundbreaking technology already exists.
Now, all there is is to wait and watch everything I’ve just predicted play out.
Roald Dahl literally wrote a story about AI software replacing MOST human writers. Although he called it a writing machine and MOST established authors published stories under their name written by the machine. The holdouts were the very few writers who wrote better stories than the machine could produce.
I at least hope the A1 is capable of knowing the difference between less & fewer, a disturbing trend over the past few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator?wprov=sfti1
God, I really want to believe that people can distinguish between the quality of AI-aggregated (I won’t even grant it “generated”) fiction and authentic human writing. But they don’t seem to be able to discern extremely objectively bad human fiction from very good human fiction, so I’m not hopeful.
Canva’s role in this is funny in a “hahaha kill me” way, because as a former graphic designer, I’ve had plenty of experience with people who think Canva is a replacement for hiring a designer. *I* may know that my work is better than what my boss can slap together on her phone, and other artists may know; but if apparently nobody else can tell, do I still have a job?
“Aggregated” is the best way to describe this. I played with it for a long time, giving various romance trope prompts for scenes, asking for a synopsis, etc, and it nailed the formulaic beats perfectly…because it was copying them and had learned all of the most overused, cliché stuff, simply by virtue of those being the most common in its knowledge base.
Trying to push it off of cliché (every single scene either ended with triumph or a “dun dun DUN” beat) didn’t make much progress. But if someone just wants to steal from others and doesn’t care about originality or quality, I imagine they’ll be happy.
Yeah, sadly the only people who will benefit are the ones already getting hooked on those scams to churn out “non-fiction” on “popular” topics by buying into a sweatshop ghostwriting studio. They probably don’t even sell the books most of the time, no one actually wants them, but the scammers got their money and the “author” could say they published something. Now those same people can just buy an AI and dump random prompts into it instead… I guess that’s better?? The glut of crap will become higher for sure though, at least until AIs improve further which is still scarily fast in some respects. I honestly wonder what it’ll be like if the AIs ever get good.
I definitely see how AI could be an useful springboard for me when I get stuck on a scene. Sometimes the flow just doesn’t come and a barebones AI prompt could really help me. Buuuut I would never publish that scene. I might use the flow of action but I’d definitely rewrite it with more emotion and detail. Readers deserve original words and creativity.
All those authors pumping out book after book used to really get me discouraged and chap my ass. But then I ghostwrote for a series already started and stopped giving a fuck. Those authors who underpay ghostwriters, game the Amazon algorithm, and start employing the AI text are never gonna stop. It was never about the joy of writing afterall. I hope for the best with all this, but am sure the dollar will win out. I’ll still be here stuck on the same scene, I am sure.
If you’re stuck on a scene, ask yourself if that scene is necessary and try omitting it entirely to find out. Sometimes it’s just hard to get it out there and sometimes it’s your brain telling you, “that’s a waste of everyone’s time; we don’t need that.”
And if you can’t seem to remove it, maybe find out what purpose that scene actually serves and see if there’s a better way to get that idea across. It could be that you’re making it harder on yourself than it needs to be.
OR sometimes you’ve just taken a wrong turn into Albuquerque and you actually need to go back further than you realized in order to remove the roadblock. You still might be stuck but at least you’re focusing on the right problem to solve, instead of the problem you think you have. Getting feedback can potentially help.
lol But I feel you on all of that. I can’t even bang out a proper novel that I could maybe sell, just fanfiction intermittently. And even if I could get that far, I doubt I’d be able to market it properly. Same for a comic or anything else.
I could tell. I got a few paragraphs into the AI-generated opener and I snickered because I realized what you were doing. That’s the thing about AI writing that gets lost in all the hype—IT’S NOT THAT GOOD. It’s simply good for a machine. If I wrote the way an AI writes, I’d be mortified at how simplistic it was. But we’re too dazzled by how miraculous it seems for an elaborate prompt to be rendered in a matter of seconds to really notice how weak the writing is. Grammatically perfect, treating syntax like code, but taking no chances and introducing nothing truly new.
I think anybody who tries to pass off AI writing as their own writing (at the level of technology we have now) is going to find that the things we gloss over when we know an AI did it will not be glossed over when a human takes the credit.
it definitely gave me the feeling of reading a paper written by roughly a middle schooler? i say roughly a middle schooler because that’s my son’s age, and it felt like something he’d write especially when he didn’t care for the prompt at all.
I feel this way too. After playing around with ChatGPT for a while, I’ve not received any writing from it that would be genuinely good for a human writer.
I’m stupid and it took me longer to figure it out but I realized the arguments were bare-bones and conflicting, then basically nonsensical because humans can create misinformation just fine and I got a little worried and confused lol. It was a relief to find out it was an AI but you’re right, very much an essay report written by someone who just needed to hammer something out for a grade or stir the pot in the news or any number of mindless immediate things that everyone will quickly forget if they aren’t simply scared or enraged by it.
My eyes just kinda glazed over for the other AI results and I had to make myself go back and properly read the dialog bit and yeah… it’s pretty bland and empty. It’s funnier when you give an AI some story excerpts to continue instead of a proper prompt because then it goes a little more off the rails, not knowing quite what you’re after. That could also depend on which AI program it is though.
as a digital artist, i’m one of the people screaming about the AI “paintings”. and every time i see someone use AI for “writing”, i cringe and worry, thinking similar thoughts to this post. i’ve found those videos or posts of “i fed an AI a hundred christmas movie scripts and asked it to make a new one” funny, but also worried about them because that was early on and i knew they’d get better and better. script writing, book writing, drawing, these are all arts that are better for the humans who create them, and they’re all in danger IMO of being fully taken over by AI in professional industries because it’ll be cheaper and “no one cares anyway”.
the implication that artists are “no one” really frustrates me, and puts the tiniest black cloud over the joy i feel when i remember that i’m finally able to take an art class this year. i want to be able to share my work with my friends, and instead of posting it more publicly so even people i didn’t realize were watching can see (apparently i have watchers on DA, i only learned this recently!), i’m scared to do so in case it gets scraped up into some algorithm to be spat out mingled with another twenty artists’ works for someone who doesn’t give a damn about us and thinks AI art (in any form) is the same as humans being influenced by masters in their fields.
also, sorry if this is rambly lmao. i didn’t get my coffee until really late today, so my whole brain is still mushy until it kicks in LOL
I decided to continue sharing my art because if they scrape my garbage up, they’re gonna get garbage back out lol. (I’m also on DA, no idea why I have followers other than my account is stupidly old.) I need to share more of my epic failures (not that all of them are, most are just bland, but the ones where I was trying something out/developing a design) just to gunk the AI but unfortunately people will just assume it’s the AI being randomly shitty again, if it ever gets past the point of such obvious flaws upon closer inspection. Although maybe that’ll help it learn more… maybe feeding in bad art with horrible anatomy is a good idea?? Can that improve it by teaching it what looks awful or wrong? Hrmmm… I wonder if feeding it art tutorials does anything…
But yeah, I think what people will find is stuff made by actual humans with passion will sell better in the long run regardless. Maybe not by enough but you can more easily overlook flaws if you can see the kernel of genuine investment. AI will still be a very obvious cash-grab and while those can become popular in spite of that, people often enjoy the same stuff (it’s how cliches get such a stronghold), most of the time people don’t know what they want or companies just keep pushing their opinion of what people want so at least a large chunk of the popular stuff will also take everyone by surprise and make companies scramble to get on the new trend. The AI might take some time to catch up in that case but I don’t really know how long. Ehh I guess it may not matter in the end but it’s like with any franchise being milked for all it’s worth, you know? AI will just turn everything into that and it’ll be a little easier to tell who’s actually trying until the AI can get clever enough to be truly original in some way, shape, or form.
Of course, the thing is companies are already just sort of doing this with artists, movie crews, writers, and so on, so using the AI won’t even change much, other than making things created by actual people rare and/or expensive. If that boosts wages/contracts/commissions that’d be great but capitalism is always trying to dump cost for the almighty golden profit and human beings are nothing but a number in that equation. Which will in turn mean they’ll have a harder time getting anything new out of their machines… of course the other thing they forgot is they can’t sell art tools, materials, or programs to the AI so they’re also gutting an entire industry and a half this way. The only ones left will be wealthy people who dabble in such things.
I promise I’m not saying this to brag, but… I could tell that the beginning of this post was AI-generated damn near instantly. That’s the thing about these writing AIs: They have a very generic, bland and, ironically, recognizable style.
First of all, it’s repetitive. Your sample story uses “We must not fail” and “We will not fail”. If it’s meant to be one line echoing another, it’s poorly done by the AI.
Secondly, there’s no characterization. No description of what anybody looks like. Or of what the spaceships look like. Nothing. Or any details about why, exactly, the galaxy’s fate depends on these generic characters in a generic space battle.
Sure, the story is coherent, I’m not debating that, but there’s nothing in there to catch the reader’s interest and make them read that story instead of something else.
Several times during the past month alone, I’ve read articles about AI writing. Every time, the article has presented the “surprise twist” has been that an AI wrote the article, and every time I’ve already noticed that fact from the bland inoffensive style. The sentences aren’t very long or complex, and have no unusual stylistic quirks otherwise. I don’t know how things will develop, of course, but the currently available AIs just aren’t capable of creating anything creative. (It doesn’t surprise me that essay writing by AI is the most currently discussed problem, and not fiction. Nobody requires an essay about, say, physics to be exciting to read.)
The first time I saw a text written by an AI, I was super impressed. Then, when I played around with an AI myself, I realized how incredibly limited its ability actually is. It reminds me of my cooking. I’m excellent at making burritos. Apart from burritos, though, there’s literally not a single dish I’m capable of cooking.
I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for a while (admittedly a different AI than the one you mention using) and I’ve noticed that when I ask it to write a short story, it keeps producing the same kind of basic structure and bland dialogue over and over. I’ve seen a lot of people online talk about how much fun it is to play around with AI writing, but I’ve never seen anybody say that they use it for creating genuinely well-written, interesting fiction.
I don’t know how things will develop, but for now, AI-written stories seem to be dancing bears. The bear might not be the best dancer, but it’s exciting to see a bear dance at all.
The AI is the same. It doesn’t write very interesting texts, but the novelty value is huge.
It’s a bit like how I’ll fully agree that it’s impressive that a three-year-old can read books at a ten-year-old’s level, but that three-year-old is still inferior to even an average eleven-year-old child, even more so to an average adult.
It’ll write a rhyming poem describing Batman’s suit, and the rhymes might not be all that creative, or even always rhyme perfectly, but the fact that it can write a poem about the Batsuit at all is cool. And when I asked it to write a dialogue between two women talking about their day, the result was as bland as it could get.
To sum things up, I’m not trying to deny that AI writing (and drawings) can pose huge issues in the future, I’m just saying that the state here and now seems to be that they’re just not that good. They’re good for machines, but they’re not good.
On a different note: you mentioned that the art-AI leave the original artists’ signatures visible in the AI generated final product, but I’m told that this is a misconception and that what the AI actually does is generate a new signature based on the art it’s been trained on. It’s seen so many signatures in paintings that it reaches the conclusion that you’re supposed to have some sort of squiggle there, and so the AI adds one to its own drawing. So it’s still based on other people’s art, it’s just not a case of taking one specific artist’s signature and leaving it unchanged.
(Not saying this to defend all the issues and problems with AI art, mind you.)
(And just to be clear: if this is wrong, and there are proven cases where an AI signature was clearly based on an identified signature by a human artist, I welcome corrections.)
I don’t know about a signature but I DID accidentally find one of the components of a funny AI image someone posted on reddit (I tried finding the original post and couldn’t.) The AI was prompted with something like “Futa Girl with a Horse C*ck” but instead of giving her an anatomically distinct dong, it turned the anime girl into a weird centaur where the horse’s back legs were also the anime girl’s back legs and the horse just continued on as a horse does, being a horse, in front of her pelvis. (The legs were all wrong but at first glance you’d just think it was a horse standing in front of an anime girl.) It was hilarious and I saved it.
Then later I found an image posted to Michaels (the craft store website) in a review for a pencil extender and I think they had their hand blocking part of the picture but they were holding the product in front of what I believe is a coloring book image of a horse and that horse was absolutely the same one used in the AI art. I don’t know if they fed the coloring book image in its entirety (my best guess, though I was too lazy to hunt all of google to find that one) or if it found the Michaels image through a google search somehow, or if maybe the AI post was a fake because it’s such a good punchline, I’d believe someone did that. Regardless, I identified the horse because although it was colored in and the leg joints were mangled, they kept the head, neck, and body the same. (So again, could’ve been a fake someone made a mock-up of and if that’s the case, it’s not a good example. But that’s what came to mind. I don’t know of anything else that close so I’ll easily stand corrected if I’m wrong.)
The AI doesn’t have a voice of its own. I could tell within the first sentence that it wasn’t written by Jenny Trout – your posts are never so passive and impersonal.
I don’t know how likely it is for the AI to be able to advance beyond this simplistic, personality-free style of prose, at least for a good while yet. I’d be genuinely appalled if this dreck was actually getting published as human literature.
That space story felt like reading a page in a comic-book that turns out to be actually just an advert for breakfast cereal. It superficially looks like real content, but it just fails to connect to anything emotionally, because its real aim is to get your eye onto the bowl of Sugar-wheats in the last panel.
I somehow can’t imagine readers buying this crap.
Now I want to write a Bradbury-esque dystopia in which the remaining Human authors coalesce to write anti-machine propaganda and heartfelt poetry under an underground publishing house called Luddite Press.
AI writing may have the bones, but it will never have a soul.
I’m worried about AI writing because I do freelance writing as my ‘day job’ and 9/10 people looking for these services want it fast and at poverty wage already. Freelance writing is about to become a horrendously vacant job market. I’m lucky that I have a handful of regular clients that depend on me for their specific voice and style and we have great rapport. But it’s not like that for everyone, especially people writing ad copy and blog articles.
I’m worried about it in the publishing market (especially serial apps like Radish) because despite the amount of people who say they can ‘tell’ that these stories are written by machines, a lot of the popular bestselling indie books in KU and on serial apps are churned out by writers that compare to that level of writing and editing. I know writers that make their living uploading 2-3 chapters a day on sites like Radish and iReader and they’ve said themselves that they don’t take the same care that they do on their ‘real’ books that they publish under their main pen names. AI will very easily replace that, and people that make their living writing on these apps are going to get swamped with books that take a machine a few hours to write.
In the main marketplace like Amazon I am less worried about readers that are dedicated to human authors and more that it will just be very hard to find good unique human-written books in a veritable FLOOD of AI books. Because they can release so so fast, how many of these are going to flood all of the popular niches and water down every single market? Sigh. For people with an established fan base and brand loyalty it won’t be so bad, but anyone who is depending on discoverability is going to get buried. It’s already so hard to get visibility as it is.
I’m trying not to be depressed about it because I’m always going to write and publish and I have the luxury of not needing royalties to pay my bills due to my day job. But man my dreams of one day writing my own books for a living feels like it’s not at all attainable if things go this way.
These are my predictions as well.
Not even worries, just predictions.
Unless there’s some miraculous incident of AI companies in any field fudging over a Very Big Corporation’s business interests resulting in a court case, I don’t see there being a stop or a change in how AI will take over creative niches.
Amazon books will get flooded with it. There will be “authors” with thousands of books to their publishing name. I’m not confident that ghostwriting will be a viable option as a career for very long.
As for visual arts: storyboarding and concept arts will die as human professions. They’ll be replaced by a “touch up worker” who goes through the AI creations and fixes smears and extra limbs. Book cover market will only support cover “artist” using AI generators. Probably same with product and logo design. Then it’s picture books and animation. Mural artist will probably be some of the last to survive just for the lack of tech and visibility for the field.
Unless there’s a law passed protecting original works from being included in practise sets, I don’t know if any field will be livable for human artists, because there’s nothing stopping corporations creating facsimiles of an existing artist’ style for their personal use/limited run collections.
Would the average consumer seek out handmade arts, with flaws and all, if similar is available for a fraction of the price in bulk, created by an AI for Big Corp? Did people stop going to see Avatar when it was pointed out that the white saviours are literally wearing another race’s bodies as costumes? It’s so pretty though!
The way mass production of AI gunk drowns the few truly original creative sparks and makes our culture even more poor for it… :/
I’m giving myself credit for noticing that something felt wrong with the first paragraph in this post — I was thinking “This is the flattest and most basic Jenny has ever sounded, but maybe it’s the subject matter.” So I was relieved to find out it wasn’t really you.
I also find the AI writing to be weirdly dysfunctional. It produces contradictory statements within the same essay, and is reminiscent of a speaking approach I’m consciously trying to train myself out of — I grew up in a family where it wasn’t safe to make firm, open, or revealing statements, so I developed a wishy-washy speaking approach so that if what I was saying provoked a negative or hysterical response, I could backtrack and say I’d meant just the opposite, because I’d kind of said both things. There’s a word for this communication style, but darned if I can remember it or find it now that I’m actively looking for it.
At any rate, the AI sounds more sure of itself, but its sentences about how “AI writing is as good as or better than human writing, but also may be of lower quality and less creative,” remind me of how I’ve spent much of my life trying to cover my tail for all possibilities when I speak. It’s weird to me to see this from machines that never had a childhood. And it’s not just here — I’ve noticed that “it is, but it isn’t; it could be, but it might not be” pattern in every openly AI-generated article I’ve seen so far.
You put the finger on it. One awful trend of AI writing is this need to be completely inoffensive and say “This seems to be true, but it also might be false.” Like a stereotypical horoscope profile: “You’re generally friendly, but can get angry at times. You enjoy people, but also need to be alone sometimes.”
Since everyone else is, I hadn’t heard of AI writing (excepting Roald Dahl’s story) until the subject of this post. I was disappointed seeing such a simple analysis from someone whose writing I respect. Especially the last paragraph, with the “in conclusion, the good stuff and the bad stuff are equally possible.” I was, at that point, thinking this was a great example of a ten-year-old’s writing assignment and WTH, Jenny? when I hit the next paragraph and saw it was AI.
There is so much crap out there. This IS better writing than a lot of dreck I’ve seen. That’s the sad part. The sadder part is that if AI gets even a bit better, the publishing houses will probably be all over it. Here are a couple of excerpts from the anti-monopoly hearing of the Penguin House and Simon & Schuster merger:
https://www.ilona-andrews.com/2022/publishing-partners-ebooks-doj-hearings-and-all-that-jazz/
Authors are burdensome beasts that take up resources otherwise devoted to profit. Dontchaknow.
So the world just hit 8 billion of us, yet we are letting AI take over…. where does that leave most of those 8 billion in terms of future job prospects? Not everyone can be a specialist, and the less skilled, manual labor will eventually be replaced by AI. Heck, go to any store, and chances are they have self-checkout. That is something I’ve always asked myself. When jobs that used to be done by others eventually get replaced by machines or “self”, those ousted, where do they go then? Now onto the AI generated writing. I remember reading about the outrage of machine translations a certain publisher was accused off. Of course you had those who were ok w/ that because then we’d get faster translations, but what those people don’t understand it the nuances in language. A machine most likely will literally translate. For example, I’ve been reading a novel that has been machine translated from what I thought was its native language, but it may be translated from an English translation into Spanish. Anyway, throughout the text the word “right” has been translated literally as “derecha”. In Spanish. “right” is a direction, not an affimation, but the machine doesn’t get this. It sees “right” and just directly translates the word instead of looking for the appropriate word it needs. So instead of translating “right” as “derecha” for an affirmation, it should be translated as “correct” or “ok” or some other word that affirms. I would assume the same would happen with AI generated text. At some point the machine won’t be able to understand the “why” behind the author’s intent.
I have no faith in any industry ‘doing the right thing’ for moral reasons, but I have at least been heartened by recent legal test cases ruling that AI created art can’t be copyrighted ….
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise
Of course, there are bound to be all sorts of ways round this, but at least it’s not going to be as straight-forward as ‘I got an AI to write a book, now give me all the money’.
Ngl when I started reading this I was like “…why is Jenny writing like an elementary schooler who just discovered 5 paragraph essays?” And then I was like “hey wait is this a guest author or something? She used to do those.” I am ashamed to admit that despite the subject matter it took me WAY longer than I expected to connect the dots.
Part of the reason, though, was that this level of advancement was unexpected. I’ve read AI-produced writing in 2017. It wasn’t even coherent yet. How the hell did they get this far in 5 years?! And that is truly scary for the fate of writing, editing, and maybe even publishing. Not for quality reasons; for human rights reasons, and economic reasons. The most realistic fear around AI has always been what those in power will do with it, and how those without power will survive when those with it no longer need them.
I hadn’t heard of writing AI before reading this entry, but the opening portion came across as weird. It read exactly as the TAAS essays I had to write in school. TAAS was a state standardized test in Texas, and the writing had to follow a formula that dictated, sentence by sentence, what you had to say. No room for creativity.
It’s a terrible way to teach kids to write, but that’s another discussion.
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Awesome. You got an AI bot reply.