We’ve all been hearing a lot lately about how AI will either change our entire way of life or, in the worst-case scenario, how it might wipe out the human race entirely.
That claim gives AI a lot of power over our lives. If it’s true, then we’re all in serious trouble.
We’ve also heard a lot lately about how AI will change the arts, especially the art of writing, now that AI can do the job so much faster, more accurately, and more efficiently than humans. After all, we don’t have to worry about making grammar and spelling mistakes when we have AI to do our writing for us.
Do a quick internet search and you’ll find no end of articles, charts, and infographics showing that the arts are likely to be one of the industries most drastically affected by the advent of AI.
So what does this mean for us as fiction writers?
When I first started to make the transition from ghostwriting for paying clients to publishing my own work under my own name, I had this conversation with my writing coach.
She’d recently been listening to a publishing-related podcast where the guests were saying they planned to publish ten thousand books a year with the help of AI.
“How do you feel about that?” she asked me. “How will it affect you to compete against that kind of output?
My answer was unequivocal and it galvanized my determination to publish my own work.
I don’t believe that kind of publishing will affect me at all.
I don’t consider myself to be in competition with those people or their work—not in any way whatsoever.
I believe AI will affect the fiction market in one very significant way.
I believe the fiction market will very quickly divide into two very separate and unbridgeable audiences.
The first will be those for whom AI-generated fiction offers some appeal. I don’t really understand this because AI-generated content doesn’t appeal to me, so I can only guess who these people might be and what they might be thinking.
These might be people who read vast numbers of very low-quality books and who don’t care about things like connecting to and identifying with the characters.
Again, I don’t really see how this would be possible because even the lowest quality fiction still relies entirely on characterization, internal conflicts, and the audience identifying with and investing in the characters.
For the sake of argument, let’s say this audience actually exists and these people would like and buy AI-generated fiction.
The second audience will be those readers who specifically want and seek out fiction with a human element—fiction that goes out of its way to tell human stories about relatable human characters going through normal, identifiable human conflicts.
These readers will be repulsed by AI-generated content. They will avoid it like the plague.
Modern fiction audiences are smart enough to tell the difference between these two offerings. They will very quickly develop the ability to distinguish AI-generated fiction and fiction that has been written by a human author about human situations, people, and relationships.
So my response to my writing coach was this:
If someone is interested in AI-generated fiction, I don’t want that person anywhere near my book. I don’t want them even looking at it and I definitely don’t want them reading it.
Those people are not my audience and I have no intention of competing for their readership. Those people are not the readers I’m trying to attract.
I want people who are interested in human themes and human emotions. I want my work to be a study of human nature.
In fact, all of fiction is the study of human nature. Characterization is the mastery of accurately and realistically portraying human emotions and human relationships.
Readers read fiction to form a human connection with the characters and to see themselves reflected in the characters’ experiences.
And human nature is something that AI will never be able to replicate.
We’re already seeing a backlash in the fiction market against AI-generated content.
The vast majority of the jobs posted on my freelancing platform specifically prohibit AI-generated content, and thanks to AI itself, we now have the tools to identify AI-generated content using AI tools.
There are rumors that Amazon plans to introduce a feature to its book marketplace where authors and publishers have to disclose whether a book was produced using AI.
Even if this never happens, I believe the reading public will be able to tell the difference. Readers will very quickly begin to recognize whether a book was written using AI and readers will be completely turned off by something that was written by a computer.
I also believe we will see a divide in the price spread between books produced by AI—which will cost nothing to produce—and human-generated fiction. Human-generated fiction will cost more.
AI-generated fiction will be sold for less because those who put it on the market will try to appeal to people based on the lower price. On the other side of the divide, readers will be willing to pay more for fiction that actually relates to their daily lives and fulfills their desire to connect to the characters at a human level.
Let’s use music as an analogy.
Compare the artist Tom Waites with any random computer-generated synth music. People will pay hundreds of dollars for a single ticket to see Tom Waites in concert. He’s considered a legend in the music world and commands the highest respect from other greats in the industry. He’s one of my all-time greatest artistic heroes precisely because he’s so unique and so mind-blowingly talented.
No one would say anything like that about any kind of computer-generated music. No one goes out of their way to see computer-generated music performed. It isn’t good for much besides background music.
AI would never be able to reproduce Tom Waites’s work. No computer program would ever be able to predict that his combination of grit and tenderness would produce such an appealing product. He’s totally unique in the world for the content of his lyrics, his voice both figurative and literal, the poignant, touching emotionality of his musicianship, and the unexpected combination of all those factors.
Tom Waites has been famously quoted as saying, “The world is a ghastly place and bad writing is spoiling the quality of our suffering.”
This quote so perfectly embodies everything that Tom Waites stands for and everything that he accomplishes with every single song in his entire body of work.
Every one of his songs describes human suffering and the ghastly nature of the world in which we live, and yet, the music he uses to accompany these descriptions elevates his subject and shows us the beauty and human element of everything he sings about.
AI would never be able to do that. AI wouldn’t even think of it. AI will never be able to comprehend what makes this combination so appealing to us or how or why it portrays such a deep dimension of the human experience.
I can give you two examples from fiction, but we can see this same problem in countless other examples across every artistic domain.
The first example is Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. If you told an AI generator to write you a children’s story about a pig that makes friends with a spider, the generator would never come out with Charlotte’s Web because the book isn’t about a pig that makes friends with a spider.
This book is being taught in university creative writing classes as an example of one of the most perfect works in fiction history. There’s a very good reason for this. The book is about humanity itself.
Charlotte’s Web is about the meaning of death in human experience and what death a person’s death means to the survivors. It’s about how death makes way for a new dimension of meaning through the next generation. It’s about the passage of time, growing up, friendship, relationships, religion, and a thousand other human mysteries all packaged up in a deceptively simple children’s story. AI could never have written this book.
The other example is Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne. We’re still reading these books more than a hundred years after they were written—not because they’re about a teddy bear who has adventures in the forest. They aren’t about a teddy bear who has adventures in the forest. They’re a study in human nature.
Winnie the Pooh is based on the Four Humors, a nineteenth-century system of thought that describes four personality types: the phlegmatic personality, the choleric personality, the melancholic personality, and the sanguine personality. This system is basically the nineteenth-century version of the Myers-Briggs personality assay.
Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham is another example of this from the same era—and we are also still reading this book more than a hundred years later for precisely the same reason. This is my favorite book of all time. If I was stranded on a desert island with only one book, it would be this.
The Choleric personality is a drill sergeant who directs everyone and tells everyone else what to do. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Rabbit. In Wind in the Willows, this is the Water Rat.
The Melancholic personality is depressive and sees everything as a catastrophe or a tragedy. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Eeyore. In Wind in the Willows, this is Mr. Badger.
The Sanguine personality is a social butterfly that constantly flits from place to place and never takes any of them seriously. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Tigger. In Wind in the Willows, it’s Mr. Toad.
The Phlegmatic personality is slow, plodding, methodical, happy-go-lucky, and casual about everything. In Winnie the Pooh, this is Pooh, of course. In Wind in the Willows, this is the Mole.
We see another example of this in the Harry Potter series and the four Houses of Hogwarts. Hufflepuff House is the phlegmatic. Slytherin House is the melancholic. Gryffindor House is the sanguine. Ravenclaw House is the choleric.
Each of these is a study in human nature that AI will never be able to understand. Everybody loves Winnie the Pooh because it speaks to our understanding of human nature and how different personality types interact with each other. Even adults love reading Winnie the Pooh, not because it’s a story about a teddy bear, but because it speaks. We see ourselves and our understanding of human nature reflected in its characters’ little dramas.
All of these examples are also very funny. I’ll start to worry about AI when it can reproduce a human sense of humor. That will never happen because AI will never understand why people find something funny. Humor is a reflection of human nature and human experience. It’s completely outside AI’s field of capability.
AI will never be able to produce anything that’s considered legendary or artistically important, either. AI will never be able to produce anything that causes the work to be remembered after the artist dies—because the work AI produces isn’t important. AI isn’t capable of saying anything important to our lives or of adding anything meaningful to a multi-generational conversation about what it means to be human.
Fiction is an art form, and as such, its job is to reflect, describe, and comment on the human condition and human nature. Fiction as an art form asks the big questions that each of us asks ourselves—the questions that make our lives mean something—the questions that make us human. That is precisely what AI will never be able to do.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.