I keep my finger on the pulse of Generative AI, that misdescribed beast that’s really not artificial intelligence at all. One of my favorite descriptions likens it to a really advanced version of the predictive text thing that many of us use when typing out text messages. These systems have been trained on massive amounts of our own data, mostly without our permission or compensation, and are simply huge predictive machines that come up with the most likely response to any question we pose to them (when they don’t just “hallucinate” a false answer to meet the query).
None of this is new. I’ve hashed it all out in previous columns (here, here, and here, for a start). But what I wanna talk about today is slightly different.
These systems have reached a level of ability that now allows them to write a consistent, believable story from a simple prompt. I’ve read a few of them, and they have much improved over the last couple years. If by improvement, you mean the ability to mimic the way a human writes.
But much like images produced by this so-called AI, there’s something shallow and hollow about the stories it produces. The writing is flat, and as you’d expect when you ask a machine built to guess the most likely response, the stories tend to be trite, lacking in surprise and three dimensionality. There’s no intention behind them, no “there” there.
Nevertheless, they’re getting good enough that many folks can’t tell the difference. And there’s a certain allure to the idea of having a machine at your fingertips that can create any story that you want, tailored to your own particular desires, however bright or dark those might be.
So why am I still writing? If machines are being built that can replicate what I do, why should I keep crafting my own stories? Hint, the answer is in the question. My own stories are crafted, ie: built with intention, informed by my own human experiences in a way that LLM tales will never be.
Sometimes I feel like an ostrich with my head in the sand, or maybe a writer zombie. I continue on, creating new stories, because I always have. Because I assume there will be a market for them. Because I hope that someone out there will still want to read them.
The sad fact is that, for a lot of people, generative AI is good enough. It makes saccharine candy images, slickly produced political memes that sometimes even make me laugh (have you seen the “proof of life” one where Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao are smiling from a hospital bed, and then she folds him up as a cardboard cut-out and walks away? Hilarious!), and yes, even stories that are full of flowery wording and em dashes. Many people love the ability to “create” whatever they want, sticking it to those “creative elites” who for far too long “hoarded their artistic abilities.”
But its true cost is hidden from us.
These companies poured untold billions of dollars into developing this technology and creating the data centers to host it, giving it to us for free or on the cheap, to get us hooked. It’s Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification at its finest.
In the face of such overwhelming odds, I can only turn to hope.
Hope that these systems will one day crash and burn under this year weight of money being put into them. Hope that my fellow humans will see through the candy colors of Gen AI and yearn for real connection with another human being’s work. Hope that what I do will still matter in some way.
In the end, I keep writing because it feels like what I was put on this Earth to do. When I am regularly putting new words on the page, I feel better about myself. I’m moving toward where I am supposed to be. And that’s true regardless of whether anyone actually reads my stories.
When I am not writing, I feel unsatisfied. Dull. Wasteful. Unneeded.
So it’s in that spirit of hope that I continue to craft my stories for both myself and for the people who read them and enjoy them. I set them free into the world and hope they will find an audience. Each of them reveals something true about me, the intention with which I create them, the encapsulation of the moment in time when they were written.
At their very core, our stories are one person speaking to another through prose, sharing what it means to be human. Not simply a machine regurgitating the most likely response.
That has to be worth something.