AInsanity

Just about wherever you go these days, there is much ado about AI. AI will do this or that and everything will be wonderful.

Now, if AI manages to find cures for medical maladies like cancer or any number of potentially deadly infections, virii, diseases and so on, you’ll get no complaint from me.

Its intrusion on creative efforts is where it appears to be a solution no one asked for.

One argument I’ve heard made is that AI will “democratize” creativity because, you know, apparently people cannot be creative on their own without the help of a quasi-intelligent software application doing the heavy lifting. First, any time you hear of technology “democratizing” anything, you can probably be assured that it is little more than a code word that huge corporations are about to get even richer and people—in this case, creative people—are largely going to get screwed.

AI can help you write your eMail, write a letter to your grandmother and even help you write your novel. How and why is that a good thing? (For the moment, let’s set aside the ethical and copyright issues that are still at question especially in regards to the training sets many popular AI implementations have used.)

Okay, let’s say you’re a grandparent. You get a letter from your grandchild. Isn’t that special? But, wait. The kid didn’t even take the time to write the letter him or herself because AI was used to generate the message. A machine spit it out for them. Perhaps they added some details, input some data, changed a word here or there. But, the end result is still something that’s kind of empty.

Granted, you may remember from when you were a kid that writing a letter to your grandparents wasn’t the easiest thing. You may have asked your mother, what should I say? You probably wished you had a computer back then that could write it for you. And, maybe, your mother dictated half or more of it to you anyway. So, one might argue that that’s not much different than having a machine write it for you.

But, at least your mother’s input was human. And, she dictated what she thought her parents would want to hear from their grandchild. So, there’s still a real connection there, even if the end result is a letter you (the grandchild) didn’t write yourself.

With AI? No such connection. It just spits out predictive words based on algorithms of what other people have written. The end result is mimicry and not a personalized letter at all.

The bottom line here is that the author of the eMail or letter or what-have-you did not care enough about the recipient and reader of that message to write it themselves or even dictate it. In this respect, AI seems designed to benefit hopeless narcissists and sociopaths who have no regard for anyone but themselves.

Let’s consider the novel. Or even a non-fiction book. Either way, a writer puts their human creative effort into it.

Well, until now. Now they can have AI write most of it for them. Oh, but they tweak the end result. Or their finesse the story with their input. And this and that. But, did they write it? Or did they just edit the work of a machine?

People don’t care, they say. They just want to read a book. They don’t care how it was written or who wrote it.

Okay. But if a writer can direct AI to write a story they think their readers will like, as a reader, you can direct AI to write a story you can be more certain you will like. Which means that you, as a reader, can cut out the writer entirely. What need is there of writers when machines will spit out a bespoke book for you?

But, we don’t just read for entertainment, we read for connection as well. Connection to other people who have read the same book we have or a connection to the writer who wrote the book. With bespoke books, there is no connection because no one else has read the same book you have. And, there is no connection to the writer because the writer was a machine. And that machine didn’t write so much as spit out words based on algorithms that predicted what the next word should be based on the training data.

The thing isn’t whether AI can help writers write or—egads!—spare them the “drudgery” of having to choose words themselves and develop the story and characters themselves as centuries of their predecessors have done.

The thing is why should anyone want to read a book not written by a person, a creative sentient being who put their own human mental work and time and spirit into crafting that story? Why should we want to read something generated not by careful forethought or even something written by the “seat of their pants” where even the writer wasn’t sure where the story would go until the characters that lived in their imagination informed them? Why should we want to read something devoid of actual human creativity and something that only exists by mimicking the creative efforts of countless real people?

Why read a cheap imitation when you can read something written by a real person?

Otherwise, why not just have a computer read the AI-generated novel for you? Instead of wasting time reading some soulless tome spit out by a machine, let the computer “read” it, freeing you to spend time with family or pets, or gardening, or cooking, or crafting, or whatnot.

You might even decide to spend your time reading books actually written by real people.