So many people have asked me if I fear AI will replace me as an author. Some are worried about my future. Others are curious about how I will grapple with my approaching obsoleteness. Still others ask with their opinion already formed — “But you cannot fight progress” — before I’ve even answered.
I don’t think AI will replace me. This isn’t naivety about what AI will eventually be able to do, only a recognition that once AI can do it, our definition of creativity will shift. We will move the goalposts further or towards a different plane, as we always do. At a deeper level, I think this shifting is rooted in the primacy of process in how and why we create.
People assume the goal of writing is the book, the short story, the final product you push out into the world. But art lies in the symbiotic relationship between thinking and process: In how your thinking influences process and how process influences your thinking, an ever-moving back-and-forth cycle.
What does this mean for those who think they can key in an idea and have AI spit out a novel for them (indeed, those who are already doing it)? It means they are missing what I believe is the essential value in creation: The remaking of yourself and your perspective, as well as how others see the world. Why do we do 24 drafts of a novel? It is not hard to write a good sentence. We write draft after draft because we are searching for the right sentence, and the only way to find it is to become the right person to make this book. There’s a relationship between an author’s thought patterns and the sentence rhythms that express themselves on the page, the word choice, and how the text moves or forms.
But you cannot get to that final product, the last draft that you step away from, without all the drafts that came before it. With each wrong sentence, each inadequate structure, each missing link, your thought patterns shift and reform, your ideas flow down different neural pathways — you grow, one inch at a time, into the right person.
It’s interesting how arguments like this can come across as anti-technology or, perhaps, as aggrandising art, which is often devalued in the marketplace (someone was quick to remind me that an AI book may sell thousands more copies than my 24-draft Mad Sisters of Esi, and look, it would have taken 1/24th the time). But two of the dearest artists in my life work with technology: My partner is the technical director in immersive media, particularly virtual reality, and my sister is a new media artist. I’ve watched them sweat, swear and push the limits of their art and I don’t think their technologies make the process easier or quicker — they’re inching forward as agonisingly, just with different problems (Ones, honestly, I would hate to have — imagine being caged by your medium, or working with a technology that morphs so quickly when your creative process is slow).
This brings me back to my original thought about the shifting definition of creativity. There is an essential, agonising and confusing nature to creation that doesn’t go away, and that can only be mediated through process. There are no, I am sorry to report, shortcuts.
What authors are uniting against — and I am firmly in their number — is the fact that AI exists today in a capitalistic structure that would use it to exploit artistes whose labour has made the very existence of that AI possible. Do you think AI could produce a George Saunders novel if it hadn’t fed on the novels he has made, and thus, on years of time, of process, he’s poured into his art to become the right person, over and over, to write his books? Of course not. But it’s easier for corporations to not look at that, to knock out a hundred Saunders novels (such efficiency! such scalability!) in the hope it will keep profit margins as fat as possible. This is no single individual’s fault; this is capitalism, a system that focuses on art as a product and brand, rather than on the humanness that makes it or the connection we seek from it. This is what the Authors Guild lawsuit against OpenAI and ChatGPT is about: A protest against art and labour that’s been appropriated, without permission, to be weaponised against its creators.
No one is marching against “progress”. We’re simply saying it is within our power to define what progress looks like and who it benefits. Let’s not give that power away.
The writer is the author, most recently of, Mad Sisters of Esi
