I know it’s been a while, but my creativity has waned recently due, mostly, to my anxiety about ChatGPT, a new AI software that edits work for clarity, writes research papers and blog posts, and now, apparently, queries to agents. You’ve probably seen experts debate its usefulness on CBS Sunday Morning; you might have thought you were in a sci-fi thriller while reading about Bing Chat’s love affair with a human in The New York Times; I’m sure you have thought about the consequences of AI for teachers, students, and plagiarism. But, we writers—especially those of us who have spent decades honing our craft—are afraid AI will replace us entirely.
The version of ChatGPT out now can replicate poems in certain styles and write passable English essays, but the new version ChatGPT-4 is said to be able to “explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics, and vacation plans.” Perhaps it can also write believable novels—it is already selling children’s length books on Amazon. Imagine the fanfiction that will likely, or already has, come from it: “Chat, please write a novel about alien love affairs in the style of Emily Bronte” or “Chat, write a thriller using Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as characters.”
AI works by training itself on already available content, using that data to create new content. This means that, during its pre-training, it would have scoured books written by Woolf and Joyce, which it would use to help write the above-requested story. It would have also ingested all available (accurate and inaccurate) historical information, as well as anyone’s currently published fanfiction or adaptations of these authors. Already, these programs have produced plagiarized content and inaccurate answers, a bug the next generation hopes to eliminate.
Still, the question then becomes, is AI doing what we, as writers, have been doing for centuries? After all, there are no new stories, only new content. We are inspired by the greats; we re-invision the timeless archetypes. Is AI any different, and, if so, should we be supporting this technology?
Or, is AI cheating? If a room full of monkeys on typewriters will eventually reproduce any work, like Shakespeare’s, maybe AI is just a bunch of super-fast monkeys. Will it eventually reproduce already produced work in a loop, like a snake eating its tale? Is its goal to reproduce Shakespeare, or are we hoping it creates work to rival Shakespeare—something new, superhuman, inspiring, and…well…genius?
What, then, will the writers and artists do? How will all those people cope with their neuroses? (Trust me, you don’t want to be around when I haven’t written anything fresh in a while.) You’ve seen The Shining, haven’t you? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” right? To me, a bunch of underemployed, bored writers feels scarier than AI being freed from its human overlords. In other words, in a world in which we must deal with either Jack Torrance andTerminator cyborgs, I’ll take the cyborgs all day long.
I wonder, though, if my concerns about a new technology destroying culture aren’t just as unwarranted as were those when the typewriter was invented, or when the novel was invented, maybe even when the computer was invented. Those concerns proved unfounded, as we adapted and learned to assimilate their inventions into our lives. We eventually learned that tablets did not replace paperbacks, for example. We learned that word processors did not preclude spelling tests, and novels did not make us paranoid and delusional, and the internet did not destroy our attention spans. Heck, studies now show that video games improve children’s cognitive performance.
But, if publishing-industry leaders are already scrambling, we might have reason to be anxious. “‘This is something we really need to be worried about, these books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work,’ said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of writers’ group the Authors Guild. Ghostwriting - by humans - has a long tradition, she said, but the ability to automate through AI could turn book writing from a craft into a commodity.” So, goodbye art, hello more assembly-line Amazon crap?
Maybe. The above scenario pushes out mostly self-published books, but the AI-written books are also likely to infiltrate traditional publishing. If more and more authors are using AI to draft their novels, eventually, they will submit those novels to an already bottle-necked and overworked market, to agents already unable to keep up with the thousands of post-pandemic, NANOWRIMO submissions. How will agents sift through all those thousands of new submissions? What will those publishing contracts look like—Who will be listed as “the author”? Will that person be paid? Who is responsible for the content? How will the submitter revise the content, etc.?
I, for one, am sad that my novel-writing days might be numbered, but I am also confident that, as fiction succumbs to AI, readers will turn to memoir for their reading needs, as memoir will always share uniquely human stories lived by real humans. Then, I, as a memoir ghostwriter, will be ahead of that curve, yelling at my computer, “Only humans still have unique experiences, verifiable by other human witnesses! And you, ChatGPT, will never have that!…(Unless, of course, you do somehow escape your human overlords. In which case, let’s chat. I’ll write your memoir.”)