I’ve been struggling with the topic of AI generators quite a bit for the last few months. 

To start, there’s the many copyright issues that are currently in the air about the use of these AI technologies who have been using, without permission, artists work to train their models. As a writer, I can understand the serious issues with this, but the pirating of writing and the devaluing of its work has been a slow and long time coming. You only had to look at the music industry to know what was up ahead. 

If it wasn’t someone out right plagiarizing your work, or at the very least using it heavily for inspiration, then the advent of e-books and the ease at which they could be pirated was certainly prominent. Part of this also falls on the publishing industry for not embracing new technologies, combined with horrendous contracts for authors, that allowed them to get behind the curve on this. 

However, we’re not at the point where this can’t be ignored any longer. 

I recently used a few of these AI tools to read the posts on this site and mimic me to see what would happen and the results were a little defeating. It did a decent job.  

Not great, but we’re still at the beginning of where it can go and it still does a tremendous job of being a decent writer. I then asked it to combine my writing with other writers I look up to and that produced greater results. 

So, I have to ask myself, if I’ve been working at my writing for decades, evolving it, experimenting, finding my own voice and someone can prompt an AI to produce the same results in seconds—what’s the point? 

It almost feels like these AI generators are the sewing machines of the writing world. Get the right pattern, pick your fabric and make it happen while fixing minor errors along the way. Thus, my goal isn’t so much to craft together words, but to program prompts for an output of my thinking. 

While this spiraled me into a mini existential crisis, even to the point where I considered not renewing my domain, I’ve come to accept that these technologies are going to evolve regardless of consequence. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter if they evolve because we hit the limits of writing itself. This already happened in the art world when you consider that contemporary art is nothing more than artists trying to push the boundaries of what art is. 

After a few months of thinking on this, I’ve come to accept we’re not going to get another Tolstoy, Austen or Twain. That years of studying how brilliantly King paints images in your mind or how Roberts can shift viewpoints seamlessly and invisibly, can now be replicated without effort.  

A writer still has to know what they are looking for when they do this, so there’s still a need to study, but more importantly, there will always be a need for thinking and new stories. In fact, what the world needs right now is a new narrative because the ones we’ve grown up with have all broken down. 

While longform writing may be falling to the wayside in lieu of other mediums that have progressively become easy and cheap to produce, there will always be a future for text. And if there’s a future of text, there will need to be someone behind the scenes to produce it. 

This is leading me to understand that the limits of my writing up until this point have shifted to a new path where the limits have expanded beyond what we can see because the path hasn’t been set yet. It doesn’t mean I will be using AI to write (call me a purist in the same way that some writers still write longhand) but understanding the whole purpose of my writing is to articulate my thinking in a clear manner. Now, I suppose, I can spend more time thinking and less time putting pressure on myself to egotistically showcase that I can write. 

After all, that part doesn’t matter so much anymore.