What Keeps Me Up at Night When I Think About AI
Yes, AI is coming for writers. But there are some things AI can't write (yet).
This is a post about which writing jobs are most likely to be overtaken by AI in the coming months, and which writers will survive AI for the time being. If you are a fiction writer or memoirist who is starting to wonder, “Why write? Do I have a future?”, this post is for you. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading I Asked Chat GPT to Write Fiction and It Turned into a Moral Showdown and listening to AI Implications for Writers. If you are not a paid subscriber, you can access the full archives with a 7-day free trial.
Yesterday, my husband’s friend, whose daughter is getting married soon, revealed that he had asked ChatGPT to write a father-of-the-bride speech. He asked it to create this speech based on a certain faith, one that has fewer than 10 million adherents. Although he won’t be using the speech, he found it “surprisingly elegant.”
As a writer, the “elegant” part concerns me. The phrase “not your father’s technology” no longer applies. Today’s AI language is not even last month’s technology. It is moving too fast, it is getting too good, and it poses a threat to writers in every field.
That said, some writers will be safer than others, for now. We’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s talk about how the power players in creative fields are striking a deal with the devil.
Before the Writers Guild of American went on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on May 2, it created a list of proposals. Among them was a statement about artificial intelligence.
Regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered projects. AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material, and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.
According to WGA, the AMPTP rejected this proposal, instead “offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”
AI is moving too fast, it is getting too good, and it poses a threat to writers in every field.
In other words, AMPTP is going to use AI as much as it wants. In its own four-page response, covered in the Hollywood Reporter, the AMPTP acknowledged that AI “raises hard, important creative and legal questions for everybody.”
The question we writers were pondering a few of months ago: Will AI take my job? has become more urgent at the same time the answer has become more obvious: eventually, probably, yes.
I am a novelist, short story writer, and essayist, not a screenwriter. Based on my own experiments with ChatGPT and Google’s less clunky Bard AI, I think the writing jobs most at stake from AI are copywriters, advertising writers, content writers, and screenwriters — a particular type of screenwriter, but we’ll get to that in a minute. (We won’t even talk about mathematicians, coders, researchers, and many of the previously “safe” STEM jobs that stand to suffer a seismic shift from AI). As it stands now, AI can write plot. (sort of), but it can’t really write nuance. In my role as the publisher of Fiction Attic Press, for example, I’m not concerned that I’ll inadvertently publish AI-written stories, because AI can’t write like this.