The future of the writer in an age of AI

Does the writing profession still have a future? Can AI not write more precisely, more quickly, more clearly and more beautifully than the writing human being? Should everyone who lives by the pen retrain?

This article is a report of a tour of our network. From non-fiction jobbing writers, to literary work, to screenwriters, to ourselves. Because we lawyers, too, are more than billers of hours. A network in which hundreds live by their writing. In that network there are few who do not look to the future with some apprehension. The writing professionals feel like the farmhand on the eve of the mechanisation of agriculture. The hand who looks in awe at his boss’s roaring new tractor. The companies using AI are on the other side. They see their workforce, and therefore their costs, imploding. They are rubbing their hands. But they have worries too. If AI takes over the writing, the reader might just as well ask AI themselves to write a book they want to read, and thereby save the cost of buying a book produced by the publisher.

The tour revealed a great difference in position. For non-fiction authors who have to write on specific subjects within a particular format, AI will have the greatest impact, it seems. The craft of subtitling films will soon cease to exist, I think. That kind of “useful” and strongly framed writing is first in line to be replaced. What about other translators of useful texts? They themselves believe it will not be so bad. The precision still leaves much to be desired. They are, however, also being asked to check AI translations. The pay for that is around 10% of that for a real translation, while, as I understood it, the checking does not necessarily take less work. Certainly not where texts have to be very precise. Instruction manuals, for instance.

The writer’s role in practical articles, such as this one, may become more that of an editor checking the AI output for nonsense (no bad thing). And who, in that capacity, perhaps removes an over-conspicuous flourish here and there. In time, the hard graft of typing could simply fall away. The same could apply to texts for education, for instance. That means a great many hours of work disappearing. Jobs, and the work of freelancers, are at risk. Whether an author’s personal style has added value over the rather pale AI output remains to be seen. A related question is whether AI can be creative. AI regenerates, after all. It ruminates on texts and presents them. It invents nothing itself. The question then becomes whether creativity adds enough value for the human being to withstand the machine. With practical texts that will be less readily the case.

Nobody is really confident that in time the machine will still come off worse than the human being when it comes to the art of writing and creativity. AI has only just arrived, and is already so powerful that it is almost impossible to imagine this output not improving a great deal further. That AI may well become capable of writing really rather well.

When a non-fiction writer runs the risk of becoming redundant will also depend on the subject. Mediahuis is launching an AI-driven sports news site where the editors only check that the AI is not talking nonsense. Mediahuis emphasises, incidentally, that it only uses AI to make underlying content (news reports from the Dutch press agency ANP) suitable for publication. Apart from devising “catchy headlines”, AI does little in writing terms. The AI optimises for SEO and gives the article, hopefully, the right tags. With articles of this kind (where bulk is essentially more important than quality), it stands to reason that the author will be replaced sooner than in the writing of the leading article.

Hollywood’s writers, meanwhile, went on strike partly because AI threatened to make the work of screenwriters redundant. The deal eventually struck means, among other things, that what the screenwriters write will not be edited by AI and that the employers, the big film studios, will not use AI-generated scripts. Conversely, writers may use AI to improve their scripts. Whether these arrangements will last, the future will tell. Given the complexity of a film script, it seems to me that AI could well devise or improve a storyline, but that the real work, the rhythm of the story, the dialogue, the humanity if you like, cannot yet be generated by AI. The same applies all the more to literature. All the more because there the language itself also plays a leading role.

Ask yourself whether a computer will ever be capable of coming up with a film like Pulp Fiction. Try to imagine it: the irony, the reflection on other films, the at times grotesque humour of that classic, generated by AI. Or a novel like Knausgård’s My Struggle. No chance at all, I would say. The texts AI produces now, in their stylistic dutifulness and soporific conceptual soundness, come nowhere near the level of fiction. The AI model, moreover, answering by searching for the lowest common denominator, seems to guarantee predictability. Judge for yourself: below I have included the opening of a new novel written by AI. To be honest, the sentence holds up a mirror to me as well: so this is what an almost adolescent literary ambition looks like…

The conclusion

AI will soon be able to replace many non-fiction writers. Those who remain will be the great writers. The craftspeople who manage to lift their texts above the obvious. Fiction writers have it easier. For them AI is a tool. Their humanity is, and for the time being remains, necessary to give their work the required depth.

All of this is where things stand today. Tomorrow the world may look very different.

Encore: ChatGPT as novelist

(The prompt and the results below were in Dutch; they are translated here.)

PROMPT:

Write the opening sentence of a literary novel with a Slavic character, in which the protagonist is a poet who has just woken up with a hangover. The sentence may consist of several subordinate clauses and contain at most 150 words.

ChatGPT 1

In the early morning, when the sun hung like a lost line of verse above the misty horizon and the last nightingale sang its melancholy lament, the poet Ivan Ivanovich awoke with a hangover that overstepped the bounds of his soul and summoned up the dark shadows of his past, like ghosts from a distant past he had tried in vain to bury in the depths of his poems, his eyes, heavy as old oak doors long since closed to the world, staring at the ceiling, while shreds of lost verses drifted through his mind like the ragged edges of crumpled paper, and the memory of the night before, steeped in vodka and the beguiling voice of a gypsy woman who had enchanted his heart, mingled with the bitter taste of regret that plagued his tongue.

ChatGPT 2

The morning light slid like pale gold through the chinks in the darkened curtains, and in the hushed room a poet awoke with a hangover, his head as heavy as a leaden volume of the verses he had written the evening before, while the melancholy of the night still coiled about his soul like an indelible ode to solitude, and while the memories of the smoky bars and the soft whisperings of unknown faces clung to his thoughts like dreams, it was the smell of scorched coffee and freshly baked bread that summoned him from his slumber, a welcome promise of comfort in this world in which words and vodka were his only companions, and where his heart, cloaked in the elegant mantle of Slavic melancholy, sought only the poetry that would grant him deliverance.

noAI

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