AI Writers

AI is coming so it seems, if it’s not already here.

Computers have been driving trains and landing planes for some time, but now it’s writing novels and drawing some stunning pictures. It’s scary stuff.

There was a particularly downbeat item in the Spectator about it the other day, the End of Writing it said. Now, have no doubt that before long we’ll be able to go to our TV and tell it that we want to watch a Batman v Iron Man movie in the style of Studio Ghibli, and it will be a great film. But I don’t think it’s the end of writing.

For a start, I write because I have something to say. I want to share my thoughts and insights with anyone that will listen. If I was the last surviving human, living in a cave on a planet at the other side of the cosmos, with zero chance of being found by another being, I would still write. AI wouldn’t. AI will fulfil a request against supplied parameters, it will make connections based on algorithms based on existing work and it will compile them in a way that satisfies a user requirement.

If you keep getting exactly what you want, you soon stop wanting it, because it’s there, and you can have it whenever, so it loses its value.

Sure, AI can answer questions and present information very effectively, but that’s not creative. I see AI, in this context, as a development of the audio visual interface. Like the difference between text based output and graphics.

For all I know, AI will set itself the task of tugging on every loose thread and unpicking the fabric of reality, thus answering all of the questions and handing us the moon on a stick, though I can’t help but think of the Nine Billion Names for God whenever computers are put to the ultimate question.

It could happen though, five years from now the AI could have figured it all out and set us on the path toward a Kardishev Type 10 civilization before the end of the decade. I’m not ruling anything out, but if that’s the case, worrying about writing career options is a little redundant.

My point is that although this is coming, I think readers will still want to connect with other humans. Humans will continue to write what they feel, and others will want to read that, and I think that will go on indefinitely.

It is impossible to predict where AI will take us, and where we will take AI. I imagine it will be misused. 1984 gave us the perfect application for such technology, and don’t think we have much defence against it. What will be will be, and I will continue to write about it all the same.