Creative Writing after AI
August 7, 2023 | Sean Morrissey Carroll
The novel is dead—long live the novel? No one reads anymore—bookstores are thriving? AI can replace journalists—AI doesn’t even know a list of Star Wars movies?
For all the hype and promise of Artificial Intelligence, the road ahead for robot-written fiction will be a long and winding path. Silicon Valley has a stronger tradition of producing vaporware than paradigm-shifting tech and as the vaunted AI revolution takes hold, will it be a new internet or a new NFT? And why so much panic in the creative industries?
Technology has always driven new modes of art, and today is not the first time that creative writing has had a crisis precipitated by a new invention. First Socrates railed against the written word as degrading the art of storytelling. Two millennia later the Gutenberg press led indirectly to a revolution that swept across Europe. Between the World Wars academics railed against pulp novels, comics, and the emerging unsavory genres of science fiction, westerns, and romance. The internet democratized access to publication, prompting cheers and jeers from the ivory towers of publishing and journalism as they celebrated the ability of unheard voices to reach the masses on one hand, and the inevitable dumbing-down of culture as the floodgates were opened to drown authoritative voices in drivel. Social media is the latest terror to shake creative writing to its core, withering attention spans to patches of sentences and self-referential memes; forsaking culture for content creation.
Yet still the novel, essentially the same medium Cervantes used to write Don Quixote in 1605, continues to thrive. The die has not been cast for AI as a candidate for transformative technology yet. Many times there have been snake oil and paper railroads that promised to reap the whirlwind and been reduced to footnotes in history. But let’s take two views here; first, that ChatGPT, OpenAI and their ilk are able to change writing radically, and second, that AI will fizzle out like so many pictures of poorly dressed apes.
AI Changes Everything
The year is 2040. You can read as many AI generated books as you like for $1 a month on your Kindle Hologram Chip. Human-generated books occasionally break the NYT Bestseller list but each hardback retails for $170 each and they are seen as a status symbol as much as story to enjoy. Hollywood movies, once the gold standard for quality and innovation, have shrunken to a fraction of their former dominance. Instead, tech companies churn out new blockbusters every week, created entirely in cyberspace with AI created characters, settings, special effects and scripts.
At first these AINovels and AIDramas were laughed at, the source of many a Late Night talk show punchline, but they crept towards relevance over the past decade. With the Academy Awards wins by Opertina, My Love and Destroy All Monsters VII in 2037 they were finally ready for the limelight.
As opposed to being entirely AI created, these popular books and films have created thousands of new jobs for editors. Between AI hallucinations and hiccups, every AINovel and AIDrama script is pored over by a team of actual humans to check for adherence to the 3-Act Structure and emotional consistency, two fronts that computer generated content has not mastered and may never will. Creative editors are very defensive of their projects, working overtime to keep contracts and wearing themselves out in just a few years even if the pay is good. As the journalism, copywriting, and paralegal professions hollowed out in favor of AI writers and fact checkers, the ranks of these creative editors swelled. But those days have passed as service industry jobs, no matter how menial, paid more and more to make up for the lack of manpower available. Today a creative writing graduate degree usually leads to being a janitor, stewardess, or working the front desk at a hotel. Many job descriptions list an MFA as a requirement for entry level work.
These developments have devastated traditional publishing and filmmaking. Millions of dollars that once flowed to creating and advertising the Big 5 Publishers’ blockbusters and Hollywood productions have flowed instead to the largest social media companies, who crowdsource amateurs to scan likenesses and voices to create deepfakes to act in their films as well as plot prompts for books and films, letting the will of the masses dictate the next summer blockbuster or Oprah Book Club choice and creating buy-in for creative works before they are even created. Truly 2040 is Andy Warhol’s future, as everyone has their chance to appear in a big piece of media; as long as their social media presence is large enough and test audience scores come back high.
Meanwhile, the ranks of authors and writers who self-publish, as well as mid-list authors who publishers string along to see if they will one day write a hit, have been wiped off the map. Profit margins for printing and even e-books have been driven into the red. There’s no way for an author to compete with a tech company releasing a series of twenty-four romance novels every third Tuesday. Those writers who used to make a living on their work have been forced out of the business, while writers who write for passion have dropped out of publishing, choosing instead to give away their words for free on forums and blog sites instead of paying the high prices needed to gain entry to publishing and just see their work swamped by thousands of self-similar novels picked over theirs.
So how are readers and film buffs doing, considering all this? There was a lot of pushback to early AI, certainly. But over time the quality got better, just like the transition from silent films to talkies was met with skepticism, and appreciation for pulp authors grew over the 20th century to pick out real classics among the dreck. At some point the AI conversation went from Wow, this AI book is actually good to Wow, this book authored by a human is actually really good around 2038.
Of course if AI is writing the majority of our books, films, journalistic articles, and research papers, it is also dominating the social media sphere. Misinformation is rampant. The ability to tell if your aunt from Colorado is really who she says she is has been reduced to almost nil, even if you talk to her over text, audio or video. There’s no way to tell if who you are speaking to is actually real unless you’re in the room with them. This goes for politicians and celebrities too, and every time anyone gets famous, deepfakes of them explode across the internet, uttering speeches they may feasibly believe, doing things that are questionably out of character, and caught in the act of a whole host of actions that vary from implausible to absolutely impossible.
This vision of 2040 may seem difficult to stomach, but it’s possible, maybe even likely. How will younger generations adjust to an internet full of AI content? Is it possible for a democracy to function in this environment? Let’s take a look at an alternate view of the future and contemplate…
AI is a Bust
The world of 2040 isn’t very different from the early 21st century, really. There are two political parties in America that claim to be mortal enemies but are actually very close to each other in practice, the Furries and the GOP, the Gilead Overlord Panic. Americans still go to work five days a week, but there are only five days in a week anymore and the only jobs are janitor and CFO. And people read. Oh, how they read. For $100 a month you can rent any book or film from AmazonMetaXstragram, which is a third of the price of Disney Plus. Despite the collapse of the job market the unemployment rate hovers around three percent, since everyone without a 401K is a writer, a filmmaker, or street musician. Sure, AI threatened to take over the creative industries but when the Supreme Court (and European Court of Justice) ruled that works made by AI are not able to be copywritten, the burst of AI created work that flooded the market was readily copied, downloaded, and given away freely without a single dollar being made. Corporations immediately dropped their AI obsession.
Sure, there days a little AI entertainment is a good way to keep a screaming toddler or aging parent in a Barkalounger happy, just prompt up some nonsense on a free app (filled with ads for Pepsi and cruises to the Moon) and let them entertain themselves for hours. But that isn’t what most people enjoy. You see, the AI revolution not only sputtered on the whole Copyright issue, it was also just a sad, pale imitation of real storytelling, trained on Reddit threads and Youtube comments and prone to catastrophically fail whenever two people were about to kiss or someone tried to tell the truth.
Where does this leave writers and editors these days? Well, we all hang out at home and take walks with the dogs from time to time. The Big 5 publishers have dwindled to the Big One, and they only publish about a hundred books a year (the ones you see in airport convenience stores). Instead a system of decentralized publishing has grown up around the explosion of local bookstores across the world, who acts as middlemen between authors and printers, bargaining down costs and splitting proceeds with writers. For every small town in America there is a bookstore now, and in every major city there’s one in every neighborhood. If books are ordered elsewhere in the country or the world they are printed close to where they will be sold, with little to no shipping at all.
New York has dwindled as a hub for publishing, and these days has a blossoming trade in self-help books and historical fiction. Boston is known for satires and space operas, Cleveland for gumshoe detectives and spicy romance that would make your mother blush. Atlanta is where all the cyberpunks live, Phoenix well known for literary tear-jerkers, Memphis tears through spy novels and thrillers, Eugene, Oregon devours philosophical manifestos, and Waco, Texas seems entirely composed of slavish lovers of erotica.
By the year 2024 it seemed a good idea to experiment with AI to write books with, and to this day some authors use it as a tool to pump out words or sketch a scene that just won’t seem to come out right. But every writer who uses it knows that those words must be pored over, edited heavily, and sometimes deleted entirely. AI has done wonders for people who aren’t writers; these programs can write emails, fill out forms, and compose blog posts, ad copy, and essays—as long as the goal isn’t anything more complicated than a Dear John letter to the American education system.
And the use of AI was a shortcut with a major flaw; it didn’t teach you anything about writing. Budding authors who used AI have to fix what the algorithm pumped out—and don’t have the tools or experience to fix the problems. If they ever hand an AI-generated story to an editor or submit it to be published they have to hope that it won’t be flagged as AI and stripped of its copyright—the authors’ ideas, characters and plot twists unable be attributed to them, thrown to the heap of amateur fiction like so many posts on Wattpad.
AI is this world has certainly made a place for itself, and advertisements are entirely written by text and image generators for any company with a strapped advertising budget and a tagline. These ridiculous and surreal texts were even in vogue in 2032, and there was an explosion of creative making nonsense ‘in the style of AI”, but before and soon after there were waves of culture obsessed with the authentic, the real, the handmade. The handwritten novels of 2037 were excruciating in their own way.
Will this be the world of 2040? It will certainly not be, but it may rhyme. Prediction is a futile exercise, but it can be revealing of the world we live in today. By next week, or next year, the prognosis for AI may be completely different…
And that makes this thought experiment a moving target. While I’ve written this blog post over a week I’ve done my research, reading articles about AIs origins and horizons, but I’ve also been bombarded with ads for AI products, watched breathless news articles about AIs’ transformative nature and effect on corporate bottom lines, and even went back and watched the Matrix, with its germ of our fear of AI taking over the world and enslaving us all. AI seems poised to at least modify the media landscape around us with deft accuracy, producing everything from deepfake sex scenes to customer service bots that lie poised to leap out of the uncanny valley and into indistinguishability from real video and conversations. This will have profound implications for our ability to tell if the person we are interacting with on the internet is *actually* a person and opens the door wide for bad actors to exploit.
AI can also do a lot of good, from companion care for the elderly to lifting those with poor education out of poverty. The focus on creative industries in the AI discourse feels like a red herring though, as if AI is striking at the heart of what it means to be human and missing the mark by a mile. Writers and actors striking over pay in Hollywood seems to be the main thrust of the negotiations, but the bone in the throat of executives and creative alike is over AI use in the film industry, from the ability to “own” your own image to the use of AI to cut Writers’ Rooms to the quick. The resolution of this strike will set the tone for legitimate AI use for the next decade at least.
Legislation is needed to corral AI as well, as recent copyright decisions have shown, but more is needed. The difference between the two scenarios for 2040 above lies on the ability of non-creatives to make money off of AI-generated work, and without protection for humans there may one day be no jobs left for people to do. Already paralegals and McDonalds employees are being replaced. Soon it will be auto workers and security guards. After that the lawyers and accountants of the world. The only way to save creative industries is to push for laws that define copyright as something a person can own and stripping that same protection from AI content may be the only way to do so.
A final note—in putting this out into the world I must acknowledge that these predictions about the world in 2040 may be trawled into a language-learning platform and end up in an AI-generated vision of the future themselves. If you see it out there, please let me know; I’d get a kick out of that.