Writer Brain: Artificial Not So Intelligence by Judith Tarr
This isn’t the artificial sentience of Murderbot or the Justice of Toren or even Star Trek’s Computer. It’s basically a wood chipper, but for words and images. Dump them all in, hope something useful comes out.
The problem is, at this stage in its evolution, what’s mostly coming out is garbage. A book on mushrooms that labels a deadly variety safe and delicious. Sources for academic papers that don’t exist, or are garbled or distorted. “Art” that’s off in subtle and not so subtle ways—humans with extra fingers, rooms with weirdly angled walls and ceilings, skies that never existed on this planet. It’s getting so you can’t trust anything you see online.
It's not just that the thing is not ready for prime time. It’s that it’s being pushed hard, and it’s being backed with buckets and buckets of money. Billions. For basically faery gold.
And even worse than that, it needs massive amounts of energy to run. They’re actually talking about reopening nuclear plants in order to generate enough power for the huge surge of AI that the big tech companies are avidly investing in.
All of that is bad in the way of absolute decadence. A culture so far along in its devolution that it indulges in orgies of extravagance signifying effectively nothing.
So what’s the point?
Or rather, where’s it all coming from? What’s going into the chipper? How is it being trained to come out with its confident pronouncements of, all too often, deceptive nonsense?
That’s where the authorsphere, and the artistsphere along with it, is raising some good and holy hell. Because authors’ and artists’ work is being scraped as it’s called, swept up and dumped into the chipper. And it’s not being acknowledged or compensated. It’s being stolen, in a word. As one bro lamented, “How can we make money off AI if we have to pay for the source material?”
Companies meanwhile are firing their writers and artists and designers and replacing them with AI. Saving money by not having to pay humans to do the work. (We won’t mention that saving millions in salaries and contracts requires billions in energy bills to run the AI.) (Or that the AI is so messed up that companies are having to hire humans to clean up the garbage that’s being spewed out of the chippers.)
All of this comes from the same space as the guy at the party who comes up to a writer and says, “Hey, I have this great idea! How about you write it and we split it. I get 60% of the profits, you get 40.” Because writing is the easy part.
It also comes from the space that used to be occupied by term-paper factories. Students paid to have their papers written for them, either to order or from catalogues of pre-written essays. Now it’s a bot and a set of prompts.
Where it gets actively pernicious is when an entrepreneur with a questionable moral compass uses AI to generate books and stories, and floods the market with them. It’s a real problem not just for the self-publishing industry but for magazines and anthologies. They’re being inundated with submissions, hundreds and thousands of them, so many that actual real stories written the old-fashioned way, word by word, are lost in the tide.
It's a crime wave. Theft of original works to generate the AI, and cheating and plagiarism coming out the other end in massive quantities. All the “author” has to do is pop in a prompt. The computer does the rest.
After all, isn’t that the easy part?
I’m all for labor-saving devices. I’ve lived without a washing machine, and I just about wept when I finally got one that worked. I appreciate my car that saves me having to walk miles to get groceries. On the digital side, I’ll say that with all its flaws and frustrations, Word still beats a typewriter and a bottle of White-Out, never mind a pen and a stack of foolscap. I’m good with fonts and formatting and global search and destroy, and there are real benefits to apps like Scrivener that can help organize larger projects. Research online is getting less useful thanks to bloody AI, but it’s a long way ahead of a card catalogue.
But the writing, the actual art and craft of it, is not something a machine can do—no matter what the AI propagandists will tell you. Ideas are the easy part; writer brains overflow with them. What we do with them, how we transform them, what happens to them when we apply our own peculiar and individual take on the world, is what makes every story its own distinct self.
There’s plenty of crap out there. Lots of derivative work. Bad writing, bad storytelling. But if real writers are doing it, they’re not cheating. Not stealing. They’re putting their own stamp on it. They’re making art, no matter how imperfect it is. If it’s derivative, at least it’s filtered through a human brain instead of a word chipper.
AI steals the words we humans make, to make money for companies that totally miss the whole point of what writing is. It’s a huge and painful irony that as it exists now, it’s orders of magnitude more energy- and money-intensive than simply paying human writers. The whole thing is inside out and upside down and backwards.
I don’t know what’s going to come of it all. Right here and now, it looks like being on the same trajectory as cryptocurrency, with the same hype and the same potential outcome. It’s killing writers’ careers, and it’s probably going to kill the gaming companies and film studios that have dumped their human creative departments and replaced them with AI.
It's a lesson the techbros will have to learn. I just hope they don’t burn down the planet in the process.
Judith Tarr is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. Her weekly column at Reactormag.com, The SFF Bestiary, explores the many species of animals in the science fiction and fantasy genres https://reactormag.com/
https://www.patreon.com/
She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzan horses, a small clowder of cats, and two Very Good Dogs.
Reprinted by permission
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