SASKTODAY.ca — This is the first in a series of summer thought experiments prepared for your reading enjoyment by SASKTODAY.ca writers. Each Sunday through July and August, watch for another installment. We aim to provoke your interest in a variety of thought experiments, some deeper than others. This week, Miguel Fenrich thinks about one of today's biggest game-changers,generative artificial intelligence.
Ever since artificial Intelligence software went mainstream at the end of 2022 and the early half of 2023, people have been suggesting that the apocalypse and our soon-to-be AI overlords are looming over the heads of writers and artists alike.
“I’m wary as f**k of writers who defend AI,” reads a Twitter post by @Gabino_Iglesias.
“... if ‘writers’ need AI to write stories, they are not writers,” reads another by @Black_Kettle.
“If you need AI to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a lazy grifter stealing other people’s work,” says @AWolfeful.
Humanity has always found ways to improve itself. A few examples include electricity, running water and the internet, and as a writer and author, someone who’s not running screaming with my hair on fire, I’m certainly thankful for that the constant march of progress. But I think some people are captured by this idea that because the unknown is oftentimes scary, forcing us to change our current ways, tradition must be honoured to the bitter end.
This leads me to my main point. Writers should be supporting AI, not fearing and hating it with a passion saved normally for murderers and the odd stranger who upsets you on the internet.
"What will happen to authors?" fearful writers cry, clinging, fists clenched to their laptops and Word documents, just as writers before clung to typewriters, their predecessors before clung to journals, and those before clinging to a world without the printing press.
But why are writers so afraid of what AI presents? Why are there movements and calls to governmentally regulate AI, ban its use in publications, change how copyright functions, and in the end, control how authors behave in their own homes? I thought George Orwell scared us away from a future where the government has a say over what people can create.
To steal or not to steal that is the question
When a budding writer, desperate to learn the art of storytelling and the written word, asks, “How do I learn?” what is people’s first suggestion? Read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read the greats, read the weirdos, read the poets, the short fictionists, the dystopian, the classics, the utopian, romance, westerns, literary and sci-fi. Read until you’re sick and read some more.
Why?
No, I’m serious, really think about it.
Writers aren’t born into this world ready to write the next Governor General Award-winning novel. We gather the information that feeds our writing from the world around us. Every artist steals, it’s true, but not in the sense of copying famous work paragraph by paragraph. There is no such thing as an original thought.
Is the forbidden love affair between Rose and Jack in The Titanic stealing from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette? Is the dystopian world in 1984 a rip-off of its precursor, A Brave New World? Are Star Wars and Star Trek the bloated, fan-boy ”scraping” of the greater work that is Dune?
We just don’t call it stealing when humans do it. Yes, humans have emotions, lived experiences and thoughts outside of the great, “all-knowing” machine, but the internet is arguably the biggest collection of swathes of that human experience. Remember your mother/teacher/boss telling you nothing can be truly removed from the internet?
But arguably, the idea that AI is stealing “real” artists hard work comes mostly from a misunderstanding of how AI generates its writing. Run AI-generated writing through a plagiarism checker, and you’re not going to get the validation you’re seeking.
AI doesn’t copy text directly from the internet. It uses a data set (the internet before 2021 in the case of ChatGPT), analyses the information, considers your request and writes something new from that. If we want to regulate the rewriting of sentences and suggest that copyright extends to ideas, sentences and thoughts (as some online have called for), I hope you’re happy being sued because you’ve inadvertently written a sentence similar to a Harvard dissertation from 1997.
Hey, you want this, not me.
Bye, bye literary freedom
But if it’s not stealing, they say it’s a cop-out, a cheat, a way that lazy people can learn to write and destroy everything that writing claims to be.
“Why can’t young people carve their poems into clay tablets like we did when we were kids? All this new-fangled stuff is destroying kids’ brains these days,” is a quote that can likely be attributed to a 3,000-year-old Mesopotamian parent shaking their fist at the invention of paper.
“It's lazy, it's dumbing people down, it's stunting human communication,” as writers scream into their echo chambers on Twitter consisting of their thousandish anti-AI friends who nod and tither in tandem.
A short history lesson. In the 19th century, a new invention convinced swathes of artists that art was dead. The talent of “real” artists would be lost, as cheats and lazy people were able to access something only years of practice and labour could bring. When the market was flooded with this “art,” who would survive? What invention was that?
The camera.
And this was the case for the demise of VHS when streaming services arrived, black and white films going the way of the dinosaurs when technicolour came out, or even fewer cashiers at Walmart when automated tellers arrived. What about the newspaper staff out of jobs when the internet really exploded?
And if AI is a cop-out, so is the laptop, the internet and everything else that we use to make our lives easier. You’re not a real writer unless you carve your stories into stone on a cliffside. You’re just a grifter and lazy. I’m serious, why should authors think they have the authority to say who is and isn't a writer? If you’re not making your own paper, you’re just copying the first writer that bought it from a store.
Expect a lawsuit in five to seven business days.
And what if it’s a cop-out, who should even care? So what if you can write novels faster? What if the market is flooded, and you have to fight harder to stand above the crowd? Adapt, or flounder. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you want to make a living writing, write.
Change is here, you may as well use it. Let AI write your summaries, brainstorm for you, and give you ideas for Tiktok posts. Or, if you feel inclined, let it write your whole book and make a couple of bucks on Amazon.
Why should anyone be telling another writer what “real” writing is?
Bow to the big-government overlords
And if it’s not stealing, it’s not a gift to lazy writers, they say it’s illegal.
When an author such as Elizabeth Ann West noted that she’s been using AI for her writing, hundreds of people jumped to their keyboards to voice the darkest thoughts that haunt the writing landscape today.
“You probably should have kept this to yourself. I expect there will now be other authors scrutinizing your published work for evidence that their work was used without informed consent or reimbursement and pursue legal proceedings. Congratulations,” @drjoelshulkin told her.
@AndrewChungo noted that she has, “Absolutely no integrity whatsoever. The bar is already low for Amazon publishers, but you managed to pull it down even further, congrats on your money.”
Others called her work regurgitated, fan fiction and everything under the sun in an attempt to discredit her, forcing her to shut off her comments after her post was viewed over three million times.
We’re living in the Wild West, people! We can do anything we like until the government decides to crack down on who is or isn't a writer. Have you gotten your ‘author’ ID from the federal government yet? So much for anti-censorship.
Gatekeepers: the ugly underbelly of publishing revealed
Besides, isn’t writing all about breaking the rules? Freeing yourself from the chains of the conventional? Nothing screams anti-censorship like getting scared over changes in the industry and calling on the biggest gatekeepers in the industry to change it, like @SeraphIRenn, who said, “In all seriousness tho, if there has ever been a need for agents and editors to gatekeep publishing, it’s this. I beg of you, please take clear stands against AI ‘assisted’ writing and KEEP AI OUT OF OUR BOOKS.”
And like @Andrew Chungo noted that the bar for Amazon writers is already low, all the dark and treacherous thoughts oozing out of the mouths of publishers, “properly published” authors, editors and agents are usually thoughts kept secret and only whispered about at symposiums and conferences.
And now, today, scores of publishers and agents have closed their submissions until they can “resolve” the AI ‘problem’ and the hundreds of submissions they’re apparently receiving while speaking out both sides of their mouths, saying that writing will die without the human spirit never evident in AI writing, but that they’re also unable to tell if a submission is human written.
Hmmmm.
And these gatekeepers, designated to oversee authors who come scraping and begging for a mere scrap of publication, are terrified. Because if anyone can write, how can we be elitists? And don’t get me started on the idea of AI checkers. A technology that has told me paragraphs from Catcher in the Rye is 12 per cent AI-generated, and poem generated by AI was only six per cent.
Don’t forget, writers are mythical creatures, living in dark recesses, hating themselves and every word they write, only finding solace in the bottom of a whiskey bottle. The room is thick with cigar smoke as they labour, and no family supports their pointless endeavours as they pump out work on a typewriter, destined to only succeed after their death penniless and on the street.
If anyone can write, well, what’s the point of that? Not like authors write for the love of stringing words together and telling stories or anything, duh. There is always someone shaking their fist at the sky when someone finds success in a place “you’re not supposed to.”
If you don’t like AI in writing, don’t use it. If the market is flooded, try writing better, and stand out from the AI. Your writing is better than AI, remember? And if you can’t tell the difference, who cares.
AI is no more the thief than any other author in the world, no more illegal than reading great authors and “learning,” i.e. “stealing from,” no more illegal than “inspired by William Shakespeare” or the other greats we’re implored to read. Fears around AI, when you actually think about it for a second, instead of listening to the desperate screaming of the Twitter-hive mind, scared they might not be able to put a little pen in their bio, is perfectly acceptable.
The arts, I imagine, will preserve and evolve as they always have, despite the screaming of the internet, but only if writers start to accept AI instead of running from it. Let's keep the fun in writing. Let’s try to be artists instead of fighters.
