Then they came for the writers

It comes as no shock to me to learn that people who used to be paid to write content are now being replaced with AIs. I know people whose working lives are already being affected by this. No doubt there’s more of it to come.

I’m not personally likely to be much affected because the people who like what I do aren’t looking for cheaper alternatives. My weird imagination, my odd humour and my inclination to write things that don’t fit expected story shapes are not things an AI can replace. All our current AIs can do is cobble together pastiches of existing material – they aren’t really creating and they aren’t really intelligent, although that could eventually change. People who want to consume material from predictable franchises maybe won’t suffer much if the humans are replaced with machines. 

Writing AIs aren’t accurate. They can sound plausible and persuasive, but we’re already seeing in Pagan circles that they can’t quality-assess the information they take in. Uncritically pulling together content from any and all sources is going to cause issues for humans in all kinds of ways. After years of struggling with propaganda, fake news, misinformation and conspiracy theories we’re unleashing a technology that can’t think critically about these things and has no morals. If writing AIs are designed to encourage anything, it will be getting hits and generating revenue. We can’t expect them to be truthful or responsible.

This in turn raises a lot of questions about how any of us might source information in the future. Questions of trust and value will be part of this. There’s scope for deepening cultural divides – if on one hand there are people willing to uncritically consume whatever is cheap and easily available. I suspect the kind of content I want will not be replaced by writing AIs, but it may be a lot harder for human creators to keep going when machines will be so much cheaper and able to churn out any number of words day and night.

I suspect there are serious choices ahead of us all about the kind of world we want to live in and whether we are willing, or able, to pay for things made by people rather than having cheap rehashes made by machines.