As generative AI gets better at writing, my fellow writers are getting more stressed about their careers and their craft. On the one hand, they are starting to acknowledge that some AI models can write quite well (but the work is still “derivative” or still lacks that “magical” human spark). On the other hand, they would very much like to be paid for the work these models are being trained on.
My view is this: human minds are very like modern AIs. They are just neural networks, albeit bigger and fancier ones than we’ve managed to build yet. They have a certain amount of innate capability – hardwired into the network by evolution – but most of what they can do comes from the training we give them. Take writing, for example. While some human brains appear to be innately better at it than others, they all need many years, even decades, of training to achieve competence. For example, they need to learn language skills, communication skills and the observational skills involved in understanding people’s interactions. As part of all this, they need to read. A lot. Just like AI models, people need to absorb hundreds, if not thousands of other writers’ works so they can get a “feel” for how writing is done.
The big difference between us and AIs, at the moment, is that we have to buy the books we read (or somebody does – either the friends or the libraries we borrow them from), while AIs get all their books from corporations that quietly take them without payment or permission.
There’s nothing we can do about AIs becoming better writers and, personally, it is not a prospect that bothers me. The world needs better writers. Most of the ones we have are rather pedestrian. The advent of photography did not stop people painting landscapes and the capabilities of future AI writing machines will not stop us writing our own fiction. It will mean that writing fiction becomes an amateur pastime, like painting landscapes, not a business for professionals. But almost nobody makes any money from writing anyway. So, no change there, then.
The best we can do, is create a level playing field for the contest between people and AIs by ensuring that the books the AIs are learning from are bought and paid for just like the ones we read. I believe this is a short-term solution because all art will be made by machines one day, but at least it will help today’s professional writers survive the transition.
Your piece is spot on. AI text generation right now lacks the human spark and ingenuity. Apparently the human brain has 200 different types of neurone, while LLMs seem to only have one. Perhaps this accounts for why LLMs have to scale so much to just do text generation. However, AI will get there and we will all become amateur writers (which will be no change for me). We have to find ways of redistributing the wealth accumulated by a small handful of individuals more widely or nobody’s lives (them or ours) will be worth living. (I’ve sent you an unrelated email to @cantalibre, by the way).