I too am an aspiring writer and have been for the past decade or so. I’ve written a novel-length story and recently I’ve written about 50k words worth of short stories in anticipation of trying to get published sometime soon. In the meantime I’m a software engineer using generative AI in my work every day and I’m keeping up with the dizzying pace of changes that have been coming. So, I feel you. I actually wrote a story about this to help me process all of it a little, heh.
Anyway, I suppose there are many ways to look at what’s coming, but here’s how I’ve been trying to look at it:
No AI will be able to take the joy of creation away from you. Remember that first and foremost you worldbuild and write stories because doing so brings you satisfaction and fulfillment on its own. That will never change, no matter how many AI-written masterpieces might be getting churned out in the future. It can be easy to get lost conflating the act of creating with the praise one might get for one’s creations–but try not to. Try to hold the simple joy you have in the act of creation itself. It is good and meaningful in its own right.
(I believe) Humans will always crave human-made things. Reading a book from your favorite author isn’t just you blithely ingesting the story they’ve written. It’s a connection between you and them and between you and their world. We read novels written by human authors not just because the stories are entertaining, but because we crave to understand other humans. So, I think even if AI are consistently churning out new and wonderful worlds and stories, there will always be a market for what humans can uniquely create, as long as there are humans uniquely creating. (And I think there will always be humans uniquely creating, because of point 1.)
The printing press revolutionized the way humans wrote and shared information. I think generative AI is transforming the way humans write and share information similarly. But I claim that no revolution in technology will dampen the inherit desire in humans to share and relate with one another directly, genuinely, and emphatically.
The novel is as popular now as its ever been. More people have the opportunity to read now than there has ever been. There’s no reason to be discouraged from participating in the wonderful act of creating and sharing, even (or especially) now.
If true, then this creates an incentive for falsely presenting as human-made that which is not. If doing so is easier than actually making the sort of thing in question, then the obvious outcome is that the market for such things will be dominated by things that were created by AI but are presented as “human-made”.
A full 15 years ago, a team of researchers from University College London and the University of Copenhagen put people into an fMRI machine and showed them a series of abstract images. They told them the images were either made by a human or by a computer. A clear winner emerged. People not only claimed to prefer the (identical) human-made pictures, their brains’ pleasure centers actually lit up more brightly. What the researchers didn’t anticipate, but which is likely to happen, is that this visceral preference for human over robot makers might grow stronger with time, just as technology closes the gap between them. Think of it as humanity’s collective defense mechanism.
I too am an aspiring writer and have been for the past decade or so. I’ve written a novel-length story and recently I’ve written about 50k words worth of short stories in anticipation of trying to get published sometime soon. In the meantime I’m a software engineer using generative AI in my work every day and I’m keeping up with the dizzying pace of changes that have been coming. So, I feel you. I actually wrote a story about this to help me process all of it a little, heh.
Anyway, I suppose there are many ways to look at what’s coming, but here’s how I’ve been trying to look at it:
No AI will be able to take the joy of creation away from you. Remember that first and foremost you worldbuild and write stories because doing so brings you satisfaction and fulfillment on its own. That will never change, no matter how many AI-written masterpieces might be getting churned out in the future. It can be easy to get lost conflating the act of creating with the praise one might get for one’s creations–but try not to. Try to hold the simple joy you have in the act of creation itself. It is good and meaningful in its own right.
(I believe) Humans will always crave human-made things. Reading a book from your favorite author isn’t just you blithely ingesting the story they’ve written. It’s a connection between you and them and between you and their world. We read novels written by human authors not just because the stories are entertaining, but because we crave to understand other humans. So, I think even if AI are consistently churning out new and wonderful worlds and stories, there will always be a market for what humans can uniquely create, as long as there are humans uniquely creating. (And I think there will always be humans uniquely creating, because of point 1.)
The printing press revolutionized the way humans wrote and shared information. I think generative AI is transforming the way humans write and share information similarly. But I claim that no revolution in technology will dampen the inherit desire in humans to share and relate with one another directly, genuinely, and emphatically.
The novel is as popular now as its ever been. More people have the opportunity to read now than there has ever been. There’s no reason to be discouraged from participating in the wonderful act of creating and sharing, even (or especially) now.
If true, then this creates an incentive for falsely presenting as human-made that which is not. If doing so is easier than actually making the sort of thing in question, then the obvious outcome is that the market for such things will be dominated by things that were created by AI but are presented as “human-made”.
Following up on this with something from Wired: