Will AI Replace Authors? An Open Letter to Worried Writers
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To my fellow writers,
With all the conversations about AI, it appears, as with all sea changes, there is no real consensus on how people feel about it. This is definitely true for all of us in the writing community. For some, it may feel like standing in a steady drizzle of bad news while, for others, the sun is shining on a brighter future. There’s been an ocean of ink spilled on this issue, but today I’d like to talk to the writers asking, “Will AI replace authors?” Those who may be feeling overwhelmed by these changes and those who aren’t sure how to get a handle on the issue. I’ve had a few of these conversations already with some of my clients, and I can only think that some of what I’ve discussed with them may be useful to other writers. So feel free to pour yourself a cup of tea, or something stronger, if you’d like to pull up a chair and listen a while.
Will AI replace authors like me?
As an editor, a writer, and an artist, I live at the intersection of many fields that are considered highly personal and expressive. Just about every hat I wear is one that experts are encouraging me to hand over to AI, so, as you might imagine, this is a subject I have been reflecting on for some time. Not too long ago, I met via Zoom to talk with a New Zealand writer just about to begin querying her YA sci-fi novel with agents. Active in the sci-fi writing community, she’d seen magazine after magazine shutting down due to a glut of AI-written submissions. Understandably, she was concerned about the effect that this might have on her chances of publication. After all, if AI can write short stories, how long will it be until human writers are competing with AI in the slush piles of agents and publishing houses? She was certainly not alone with her worries about the development of AI and its rapid proliferation through creative fields, but the first step towards dissolving uncertainty is to learn more. And that’s precisely what she was doing when she reached out with questions. If you resonate with that worry, I hope I can provide a few answers for you here in addition to leaving you with some food for thought. We all should be asking lots of questions because as of yet, nothing is settled. It is clear that AI is here to stay. What is not yet clear is how it will be regarded and put into practice.
AI makes good business sense
Much of the discussion about AI has centered on its benefits, namely speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. It’s undeniable—AI will always be able to gather information, research, and generate ideas faster than a person can. If content creation and speed are the primary goals, then AI makes the most sense. But let me make a careful distinction here: it makes the most business sense. While writers who publish their work must necessarily keep business in mind if they want to be successful, it’s vital to remember that the shape of success that is deeply ingrained in almost every area of our lives is a steadily rising curve. Success is often portrayed as exponential growth without end. In the writing world, this means constant production of novels, short stories, poetry, and scripts.
The human advantage over AI
If you’re reading this letter, I probably don’t have to tell you that storytelling, while it is a source of keen joy, is not an effortless task. It is emotional, time-intensive, deeply personal, and expressive. We are simply not designed in a way where we can have story constantly pouring out of us. We have built a system that prizes production and speed rather than meaning and quality, but in real life, none of us have climbed a trail that never reached a peak. With the advent of AI, writers—and all creatives whose work will be impacted by AI—need to remember you have been endowed with a precious, innate gift. In fact, it is your greatest advantage as an artist. Your advantage is that you are human.
AI can’t replicate what human writers have
For as much understanding and insight as we give to AI, for as much as we want to grant it human behaviors, it is very different than we are. To keep this letter from wandering into other fields, I’m going to be talking only about writing and centering the discussion on writing when it comes to works with a significant portion or entirety of the text generated by an AI. There isn’t room to touch on all the current and potential applications of AI in the writing sphere, and my intent is to center the conversation on people rather than the technology. However, I believe that addressing the intrinsic value of humans and contemplating our current definition of “success” is an approach that can be used for many other applications.
To begin, writers, I want to remind you that regardless of the amount of text, the faithfulness in replicating a famous author’s style, or even a sense of personality in what an AI writes, it will always be missing key elements, and these are extremely important elements. They are intention and meaning.
Writers are driven by purpose. AI is driven by a prompt.
An AI that generates text is programmed to fulfill a prompt. Beyond fulfilling the requirements of that prompt, it has no intent. The AI itself does not intend to stir emotions, provoke thought, capture attention, or take readers to places they could never imagine. AI does not desire to reflect truths of our world through fictional realms and societies, nor does it hope to create change by offering new perspectives or challenging longstanding mores. On the most trifling level, it doesn’t even intend for readers to be briefly distracted. It doesn’t have a purpose for writing beyond producing what it is commanded to create. As writers, we know intent is paramount. That intent is why we spend hours to years weaving storylines and sentences together. If we don’t have a strong purpose in our work, then we burn out, lose interest, or give up. This is just as much true for the readers we hope to reach.
Both the process and result of writing is valuable to us.
Hand in hand with intent is meaning. The creation of the work itself has meaning to us. We grow through the process of writing. We make mistakes. We change our minds. We learn new techniques, new ways to express ourselves. We see something we’ve never seen before. We trip over realizations that were waiting for us to take a step forward. In short, the process of writing has meaning, a meaning that cannot be replicated or experienced by AI.
Beyond creation, the finished work has meaning because it was created by a person with unique experiences, a unique voice, and unique understanding. The book, short story, essay, or article created by a person is how they communicate those distinctive qualities. By definition, anything generated by AI cannot be unique because it draws from all text within its reach, which has been created by thousands of individuals (and as AI-generated text spreads, the source texts will increasingly be written by other AI). It creates a slapdash average of opinions, beliefs, dialect, and structure that relies entirely on what’s publicly available or what’s been previously inputted into the AI, which is by no means exhaustive, inclusive, or all of high quality.
Addressing training AI to replicate your writing voice
To address the objection that AI could be trained on a writer’s work to faithfully replicate their voice and avoid this problem, an AI could never replicate the process of creation that allows a writer to craft a story (see making mistakes, changing perspective, learning new approaches, etc. above). It also cannot adopt the beliefs, understanding, and skills of the writer. In essence, AI cannot replace the complex, worthwhile work that a writer performs while creating, and using it in this way prevents complex, worthwhile work from occurring within the writer as well.
The amount of text available for synthesis is growing daily, but that doesn’t change the fact that the AI cannot produce meaning. It can source facts and make statements and even tell us a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but information and meaning are two very different kingdoms. If it doesn’t hold beliefs or perspectives of its own—or even preferences—what it produces must be meaningless. The meaning is only achieved if a human then crafts the raw material into another form.
Writers always have an audience
I hope by now that you’re seeing how AI cannot really do the work that you do, writers. But there’s one more important aspect we need to talk about before we wrap up: audience.
We can write for ourselves, and we often do, but most of us have a desire to share what we’ve written with others, that is, an audience. Audience is another piece of the writing process that AI writing cannot participate in because a relationship cannot form between the author and the reader. When we read, we are encountering another person, not just the characters in the story. Let’s look at this from the writing side. The world readers are exploring and the voices they’re hearing are drawn from your imagination, your experience, your sensibilities.
The reader is part of the writing process
You’ve crafted this experience for them, and there is certainly something that you’d like them to see. Something you’d like to tell them. Something you want them to feel. When a reader connects with a book, a relationship is built. It is a special kind of relationship, especially since authors and readers rarely meet in person, but it holds a remarkable power. This relationship can make a reader feel seen. It can challenge them to look again, to try again. It can open a window they thought was boarded shut forever. This is the completion of the intent that got you sitting in that hard creaky chair and typing in the first place, the purpose that made you devastate dozens of erasers and kept you wading through piles of crumpled paper.
Writers, you still have work to do
This is all to say, fellow writers, that an AI cannot take away your true work or your worth as a creator. No doubt AI will become capable of creating novels, chapbooks, and short story collections, but remember, an AI does not create for the reasons you do and it cannot create meaning on its own. Purpose, meaning, and a relationship with a reader are treasures for the human writer alone. They are also treasures not pictured in that ever-climbing slope that’s really only attainable by algorithm. We cannot compete with AI in speed or productivity, but we are also not capable of outrunning a Formula One car. That’s not a failure—but we do need to remember what race we really want to be running.
Each person will have to decide how much they will implement tools like AI into their process to be competitive, discoverable, and productive, but those decisions should be guided by personal goals, not an algorithmic ideal. In technology and business, cheap and fast wins out just about every time, but this is your work. Why do you write? What do you want to achieve by writing? What kind of person do you want to be? How will you work? How will you thrive?
Remember, what’s real is the best story
As I talked with the writer from New Zealand about AI, sci-fi, and the future, she asked me if I had ever read Erewhon by Samuel Butler. When I said I hadn’t, she pointed at a bookshelf behind her and then laughed, realizing that the book directly over her head was the one she was talking about. The book was originally published in 1872 as a satire on Victorian society, but even more interestingly, it was one of the first books ever published to explore ideas about artificial intelligence. Our conversation had just dusted off her memory of it. We couldn’t help but finish our international chat with a reflection that the worries and speculations about how we will interact with artificial intelligence are by no means new. Many questions in this arena are no longer hypothetical or academic and there are important conversations to have, but the stories we tell are still up to us, and the world we live in still has plenty of wonders, mysteries, and delights. I was certainly reminded of this when this author told me why she’d picked up Erewhon. With an amused grin, she said, “The title’s an anagram, you know. Of ‘nowhere.’ Anyway, I read it because not only is the story set in New Zealand, but the street where I live has the same name.”
Keep your head up, fellow writer. Only you can tell your story, and that won’t change.
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Thanks to Katja Anokhina via Unsplash for the image.
