More Thoughts on AI Writing

The Problems Now Have a Shape

Hello! I’m finally reviving this newsletter. I’m not yet sure how often I’ll be posting new pieces, but it’s nice to get back to it after ~2.5 years away.

Back in the spring, I published a piece about AI writing over at Blood Knife. The tl;dr is that so much of what we want from art in general, and artistic writing in particular, springs from “authorship.” That is to say, we can’t help but care where the work comes from. While machines have an authorship allure all their own, they can’t replace human authors, precisely because we care about the selves behind the writing. Something to keep in mind as hyperbolic AI discourse continues to swirl.

I wrote the first draft of that piece in February. AI writing had entered the cultural consciousness not long before, with the debut of ChatGPT. In those earliest days, AI was being treated as quasi-magical—sometimes without the “quasi.” AI was for the first time a concrete tool we could all use, but its possibilities remained amorphous, better fodder for speculation than analysis.

Now that we’ve had the better part of a year to play around with various public AI projects, the tech is being folded into the mundane fabric of daily life. Insofar as AI writing poses challenges for writers and readers, those problems now have something approaching a definite shape.

So here are a few more thoughts about AI writing:

1)    While AI writing will not put artistic writers wholly out of work, a reduction in the number of writing-ish jobs available will still hurt

I was a little too glib, in my original essay, when I dismissed SEO-driven web copy and similar forms of writing as “dross.” Most of it isn’t inspiring, sure, but it has its uses and it’s earning someone a paycheck.

If what I’ve been hearing from friends is any indication, there’s already been an AI-driven tightening of the job market for web copy and other commercial writing jobs. Combine that with the ongoing decline of journalism and academia, to say nothing of the issues in book publishing, and making money from writing is only getting harder. AI seems poised to make things worse in the near term, even if whatever prose the machines spit out will still need to be edited.

Possible solutions to this problem will have to wait for other essays.

2)    AI Writing is insidious for educators

Call me a sap, but I learned a lot from having to do writing assignments in high school and college and grad school. Being held accountable for the nuances of my arguments, the details of my style—this was all good for me.

ChatGPT and its cousins remain conspicuously limited, particularly when it comes to saying anything interesting. But the machines can already churn out, say, the type of brief response assignments instructors give to force students to show they did at least some of reading. A friend who’s been teaching at the undergrad and grad levels for decades told me just last month that he’d have to change how he approached these assignments because of AI. This problem will only metastasize as the technology improves.

I’m not sure what the answer is here. We may have to take a page from the book of Oxbridge and make students sit for hand-written exams.

3)    AI writing’s biggest threat to artistic production is not that it can actually displace human writers, but that powerful interests will try to persuade us that it can

The recently concluded WGA strike made it clear that this is already a very real problem. It’s unclear what unholy machinations are going on within the studios regarding AI, and it appears the WGA has won some assurances, which is good to hear. But I doubt the dream of producing “content” with minimal labor costs is dead within studios.

For those powerful people in the culture industry for whom “Is this thing any good?” already isn’t a primary concern, AI seems to promise a bountiful new world of ever-lower quality converging with ever-higher profits. The siren song of free labor will always be tempting. There will probably be efforts at some point to show us that we shouldn’t sweat paying $16.99 a month for a streaming service that consists entirely of AI-written* shows (or whatever). Let’s all try not to be persuaded.

*The fact that AI writing is the result of scraping existing web content adds a whole other series of complications that, when you probe enough, make “AI-written” look like it may not be a coherent term. But that’s a battle that will play out in intellectual property law.

4)    It’s good that the advent of consumer AI has us asking worthwhile questions

I wanted to end on a positive note, since I’m an obnoxious optimist. So here goes: It’s been nice to see so many people having conversations about what art is, why we should care about it, and so on. If AI is going to cause all the upheaval we’ve been promised, then we lose nothing if we keep arguing about what it all means. We might even come up with some useful ideas along the way.

There are some good possibilities here, interwoven with all the bad ones. I’m hopeful that the reaction (including backlash) to widespread AI will push culture in some interesting directions. AI-created work flooding the cultural space might make The Good Stuff even more valued in various ways. Unexpected forms of Good Stuff may also emerge, some of it in conversation—literally or figuratively—with AI.

One thing I know for sure is that we doofy, sentimental humans will keep creating art. The real war against the machines is another front in the ancient struggle: How to find ways to support good art and the artists who make it.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

It’s not like we’ve done such a bang-up job, indeed:

We pick back up with the extended story arc about leaf-collecting and aliens that I was in the middle of when the newsletter went on hiatus. It’s been a while since I was steadily reading Calvin and Hobbes, which might be why my reaction to the first panel is incredulity. Hard to imagine Calvin actually caring what his classmates think of his work, since he’s a proudly bad student and seems to universally hold his peers in contempt.

The second panel brings us back to the Calvin we know: Goofing off is sacred. Then in the third panel, we arrive at the subtly eco-conscious (this is a story about collecting leaves in the woods of exurban Ohio, after all) point about how “grownups” have messed up the earth to the point where it might not be such a bad thing if aliens took over. Hey, in this moment of revivified alien discourse, many of us have probably had similar thoughts.

A Poem

We left off with Frank Stanford, so we turn back to him and his autumnal vibes.