In The Tommyknockers, by Stephen King, main character Bobbi, under influence of the mysterious object she finds on her property, starts inventing some outlandish devices. One of these devices is sort of a telepathically run typewriter, an invention that allows Bobbi, a writer of Wild West novels, to write a new novel in just a few days. King has since said that that particular bit in the story was an analogy for drugs and that, in that period of his life, he’d often wake up massively hung over and find that he didn’t remember the stories that he’d written while under the influence.
But what if it could be true, a younger me thought. The idea sounded appealing. As someone who loves writing but for whom writing is hard, I’ve always been on the lookout for ways to make it easier. And a machine that could pull the story right out of my head sounded like a pretty dandy machine.
The problem is, of course, that’s not how it works. That’s also not how you get better at something. I think that being a writer is continually trying to find a better way to tell a story. Or, I guess I should say, a better process behind telling a story. It is for me, at least.
So when generative AI started getting pushed, at first glance, I thought this was the Tommyknockers telepathic typewriter. But as more of the truth has come to light, the more I realize that it’s just a plagiarism machine.
And I don’t mean in the way that the creative process actually works: by absorbing content and media and stories and digesting them and mashing them up and adding elements of your personal experience. Yes, new stories are created from the bones of the old, but the flesh on them is new, something people create based on their own intrinsic animating spark.
Because what you get from AI is nothing but redigested crap. Ultimately, it’s a computer program, and computer programs can’t do anything that they are not programmed to do. So you might feed an AI all of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry and tell it to write a tragedy in the Billy Shakes style, and it will. But one thing it won’t do is invent over 1700 new words as Shakespeare did.
Unfortunately, it’s not just literature that is in the public domain that’s being fed to AI. I know several writers who have told me that their published works have been used to train AI LLMs without their consent and certainly without compensation.
And as more and more AI-generated crap is put out there, soon the machine starts feeding itself, which will lead to so much homogenization and degradation. Re-re-redigested crap.
The simplest example that I can point to is predictive text in my email. Every time my OS updates, I have to turn predictive text off again. Which is aggravating because, most of the time, it’s wrong.
“No, that’s not what I was going to say. Just let me write this stupid email!”
At the end of the day, a meme pretty accurately sums up the issue: AI is a tool the wealthy use to access skill, while leaving in place the barriers to wealth for the skillful.
</AI rant>
The Chimerical Dark 