AI And the End of Everything :)

Bertie knew that Barkley needed only a hard reset to be restored to his normal, loving, playful self. But there his troubles began. He found himself situated without a paper clip and Barkley had, earlier in the evening in what, with hindsight, seems to have taken on a much less mischievous cast, eaten his phone.

Everyone is talking about how AI will replace all sorts of artist, including writers. I've not weighed in on the subject, until now, for the simple reason that it's a done deal. The genie is out of the lamp and the genie is not about to go back into the lamp. Railing against AI is just yelling at clouds. 

Why? If there's a common thread woven into the last several hundred years of human history, it is that workers are replaced by machines whenever the opportunity presents itself. There is nothing capitalists hate more than paying workers even starvation wages. If the soft machine of AI can eliminate writers, they will do it. And AI can. The only caveat is that the process will likely take longer than one might suppose. Hell, they're still printing paper newspapers in 2023. But seeing that they've already started replacing writers with AI generated content, it is only a matter of time before almost all writers find themselves in the dustbin of history. While it will affect all sorts of writers, I'll just concern myself with writers of fiction in this essay.

While there are various legal issues that will need to be addressed in the coming years, these will be contested and settled by corporations with their army of lobbyists. The question will not be the pros and cons of AI but who gets what cut of the AI revenue. Hint: it won't be writers.

Wait just a moment, people will say. Machines can't be truly inventive or creative since those are human characteristics arising out of distinctly human thought process and experiences which are too complex for mere machines to duplicate. Or to put in another way, AIs ain't human, so they'll never be able to offer the unique human insight that humans can put into words. This attitude strikes me analogous to saying that humans are unique, and superior to every other living and non-living thing, because they have a soul. If you care to believe in souls and the specialness of humans, fine, but I don't think you need to invoke the supernatural to explain the creative process (even though it can feel like it sometimes). It is a matter or gathering and rearranging experiences, specific and vague, facts and feelings, into words which may be unique, but never entirely new, simply because those words express what the creator has experienced and read in life. Given this, I see no reason why advanced machines supplied with the vast human experience set down in words won't be able to find ways by a similar process of association to use those words creatively within a well defined structure to write new, entertaining and very human books. 

And then there is the fact that a story doesn't need to be totally new to please readers and sell books. In fact, most readers aren't looking for something totally new. You need only consider at all those fictional villages where your chances of getting murdered would seem to be about one in four to realize that what most readers want are familiar stories with just enough shinny new chrome on them to make the story read just different enough from all the similar ones without breaking the expected format. Heck, these days bookshops are full of modern "retellings" i.e. recyclings of classic literature and Greek myths, not to mention all those long series of best selling books written to a proven formula to know that originality is not what most readers value most in their books

And when you consider the fact is that most commercial stories are constructed according to very specific blueprints - hero's journeys, three acts, "save the cat", etc. This type of structure would seem to be something that a machine like an AI will be designed to use and likely excel at. Human writers draw on their life experiences and what they've read and then rearrange those experiences according to these blueprints to create a new story. I see no reason why AIs cannot be designed to use those blueprints to produce stories just like humans.

If I am right, the end is in sight for a career as a writer, and as far as I'm concerned, good riddance. Clubbing baby seals to death is less brutal than the way publishers treat authors in that it's over fast. For most traditionally published "professional" writers, their career is a short, ill payed gig - a classic example of casual labor, or gig labor in today's parlance. Authors pay must 15% of their often meager pay to the agents who land them a limited project with no benefits. They are paid just several times a year, most often for what they could make working part time, with benefits, at Aldi. It is said that 60% of traditionally published writers' careers are over after three years and 90% are out in ten. I would guess that the same can be said for indie authors. Many indie authors burn out after a few years by the pace they have to produce books at.(Or their readers do.) Plus most indie authors actually lose money as publishers. Little wonder that writing drives many authors to drink and depression, making writing fiction an ideal job for a machine. And as I said, given capital's historic disinclination to employ people when there is any alternative, publishers can be counted on to replace writers with AI just as soon as they can. 

Plus, we can't ignore the fact that human writers will also be using AI to produce their work as well, so even without publishers, AI work will infiltrate every aspect of writing. Indeed, I expect author generated AI work to spread like a wild fire through indie publishing because it offers the holy grail of indie publishing - a very short turn around time between books. And given the formulaic output of most best selling indie authors, the machine version will likely replace a lot of the hand-crafted stories without anyone noticing it.

However, it is not just the writers who face commercial extinction. Publishers may, if they don't adopt, find themselves in dire straits as well. I see great potential in a new type of publishing - stories on demand - personal stories. I can envision in the not too distant future apps on cell phones that are tied to large AI systems that can generate, in a matter of seconds, stories specifically crafted for the tastes of the individual subscriber. I see it as a service where customers fill out forms describing the type(s) of stories they like and the service's AI will generate custom stories for them on demand. Feed back will fine tune these stories, allowing the reader to (almost) write their own books - while still being surprised by it. Perhaps for a premium price, readers will be able to design their own characters as well for their story plots, to create their own long running series with their characters. The fact is, AI might make the reading experience better for readers, a win for readers even if it's a lose for writers.

Still, what AI can't do is to prevent writers who enjoy writing from writing. Writing is a relatively popular form of creative activity, and it isn't going away. There will be opportunities for writers, along with artist, musicians, actors, dancers, etc. who will be displaced by AI at the commercial level to earn pocket change as an artisan. They will join the wood workers, birdhouse makers, quilters, scrapbookers, and all the other arts and crafters who create their art mostly for fun and sell them at craft fairs for a modest profits. It will simply be a matter of adjusting expectations.

Experts are unable to explain the apparent popularity of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital amongst robots. Even such relatively ‘dumb’-- or ‘proletarian’ as they would prefer to be called -- appliances like refrigerators, coffee makers and toasters are fond of scrolling long quotes from Das kapital on their status display screens. Some experts point to this as evidence of robotic humor. Others scoff at the very idea of robotic humor. Prof. Albert Humperdike is quoted as saying: ‘If robotic humor does exist, and I find no compelling evidence of it, I would allow that Karl Marx would be the height of it.’