AI Luddites Aren't Prepared for What's Coming

AI is going to revolutionize art, literature, music, and who knows what else. Sticking our heads in the sand isn't a strategy for dealing with it.

Twitter’s new “For You” timeline has a glitch — it allows you to see tweets from people who have blocked you.

It’s this glitch that allowed me to see someone subtweeting me, apparently aghast that I dared consider myself a “real author” when half my book was written by AI. (They were referring, of course, to my new book Man vs Machine: Exploring the Intersection of Literature and Artificial Intelligence, upon which this Substack is based).

I’m not going to name this person, because I don’t want to contribute to any Twitter drama and also, hey, at the end of the day, that’s their opinion, and you can’t win ‘em all

But I do want to respond to some of the criticisms I've heard from them and people like them, because I think they are wrong and I'd like to explain why. Just like the Luddites, who destroyed the textile machinery they feared would replace them, authors and other creatives afraid of AI replacing their jobs are in for a losing battle if they think they can stop the technology from advancing. You can’t fight it so, one way or another, you’d better join it.

Image created using Midjourney. The prompt was, “Vibrant illustration of an AI robot painting on an easel.”

I get why authors feel threatened by AI. Hell, I feel threatened by it myself. I don’t make my living writing fiction; that’s just a side gig. The bulk of my career has been in journalism and communications, in roles that could easily be replaced by AI within the next decade. I’m definitely apprehensive about the possibility that I could find myself out of work in the near future. But I also recognize that whatever short-term disruptions technological innovation may bring, in the long run, it has a track record of enriching us all, and I don't see why AI should prove to be an exception. Whatever downsides I fear AI may bring, I’m confident that they will be outweighed by a whole host of benefits we can scarcely imagine now.

I still find it a bit puzzling that someone would block me over my book, however, because as I explained in a thread on Twitter, the book is not so much about blindly singing AI’s praises as much as it’s about understanding AI’s capabilities when it comes to producing literature. “Whether one wants to fight the AI takeover, or embrace it, it’s crucial to understand it,” I wrote. That’s one of the major reasons I published Man vs Machine — to test people’s ability to distinguish AI and human writing and, to the extent that AI writing can match or surpass the capabilities of a human writer, explain how it was done.

It’s worth pointing out that the advance of AI is not all bad for writers, at least in the short term. AI has tremendous potential to be a writer's best friend by making the arduous task of putting words on the page easier. Chatbots like ChatGPT can produce story ideas, help flesh out characters or plot points, help break writer's block, and even copy edit and proofread text. But even if AI literature someday supplants human literature, it doesn't mean humans will have to give up their pens and never write another word. Most writers will tell you they write primarily for the joy of the act of writing, not for money. And why should that change just because a robot is better at the task than you are? It might engender a certain amount of jealousy, sure, but so does the existence of any writer who's better than you. That doesn't change the fact that the process of writing is itself enjoyable, or even therapeutic.

Image created using Midjourney. The prompt was, “Illustration of AI robot sitting at a computer writing a novel.”

It's also possible that a niche market will emerge for human writing. Just as some people eschew mass-manufactured furniture in favor of, say, wooden chairs crafted by a skilled woodworker, or favor bespoke suits instead of something pulled off the rack, some people may find pleasure in knowing the book or story they're reading was produced by a human being like them and not a soulless computer program. That market might be much smaller than the one that exists today, but it's better than nothing. That's life.

There's a belief that AI-produced writing is inherently inferior to human-produced writing — that there is some indelible spark present in the human spirit that AI lacks. But I'm not convinced that's true. It may be true today, with the technology in its infancy. But it might not be true tomorrow. Stories are composed of a variety of different elements — imagery, plot, syntax, archetypes, subversion of tropes and stereotypes — that a sufficiently advanced AI could probably master quite easily.

But surely people would never go for AI fiction, right? What joy could they get out of reading something that was made by a machine? Well, why would anyone prefer to drive a car rather than ride a horse? Why would anyone wear fast fashion when they could don tailor-fit clothes? Most people are going to reach for whatever book, whatever painting, whatever film, whatever music, pleases them the most. How it was made is incidental. This will especially be true of younger generations who will grow up with this technology from birth. Short of banning the technology, I don't think there's anything that can be done to stop this.

Then there’s the whole can of worms over copyright and intellectual property. This debate has mainly centered around AI generated images rather than AI generated writing, but it’s sure to be an issue authors will have to grapple with soon. AI image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion were trained on a vast dataset that included copyrighted images scraped from the web. Critics claim these images were essentially stolen, and that the artists whose images were scraped basically trained their own replacement without their knowledge or consent.

Image created using Midjourney. The prompt was, “Illustration of AI robot wearing headphones sitting at a sound mixer turning and twisting knobs.”

I’m not necessarily defending the ethics of using copyrighted images to train AI models. It was probably not the best thing for these companies to do, if for no other reason than optics. But part of the creative process is copying the work of others — not stealing their work directly, per se, but taking inspiration from their style. This is true of art, it’s true of literature, it’s true of music. We would not have nearly the diverse array of books, movies, paintings, songs, etc., that we enjoy today if it weren’t for people taking inspiration from numerous sources and melding them into something new. It’s a beautiful thing! There are legitimate questions about whether these AI image generators copy certain artists’ styles a little too closely, but overall, taking inspiration from established artists is part of the creative process and that doesn’t necessarily change just because it’s an AI doing the creating and not a human being. Plus, Adobe has created their own AI trained on licensed and original artworks that completely sidesteps this ethical issue. Even if Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion had to start over from scratch using only licensed images, AI art is coming, like it or not. The same will be true of literature, music, and who knows what else.

I don’t mind that people disagree with me about these issues. This is a powerful new technology that will have an incredible impact on numerous industries, not to mention on numerous individual lives, and these are conversations that must be had. But that’s the thing —  it takes two or more people to have a conversation. En masse, shying away from difficult conversations about important topics that have the potential to totally upend our way of life is not good for society. So whatever your beliefs on AI-produced art, I encourage you to join the conversation — rant at me on Twitter telling me how wrong I am; leave a comment on this post dissecting the arguments I've made; make a TikTok calling me out. Just don't stick your head in the sand, because that's a recipe for disaster.