If Chatbots Can Replace Writers, It’s Because We Made Writing Replaceable |
A few months ago, I went to a birthday party at a bar in Neepsend, an old industrial neighbourhood by the River Don in Sheffield. The bar had been a steelworks once, but now it was another example of the international style you find everywhere, from Portland, Oregon, to all the other Portlands in Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand: exposed brick, steel beams, concrete floors, Edison bulbs. The steelworkers had been transformed into accountants and brand managers, the molten pig iron into £9 cocktails.
When we sat down for dinner, I was placed next to a German who ran a small publishing company specializing in AI-generated motivational e-books. Trying not to be rude, I asked him how he’d gotten into this line of work. He told me he had trained as an academic philosopher. A post-graduation period of unemployment had given him plenty of time to play around with AI software, and he soon realized there was more money in inspirational quotes than there ever would be in phenomenology.
I left the party feeling a bit low. Neepsend was buzzing, but all I could see were the derelict factories overhanging the river, the crumbling smokestacks sprouting vines and buddleias. This nondescript tract of the River Don was once a white-hot centre of the industrial revolution. Now that the factory work has largely been automated, an entire way of life has passed away. It hadn’t been a great life for the workers in the steel mills—when novelist George Orwell passed through the city ninety years ago, he described the back-breaking work, the low wages, the poverty, and the grime that afflicted what he called “the ugliest town in the Old World.” But it gave people a sense of purpose and identity. And god only knows the low wages, poverty, and grime haven’t left Sheffield, even if they’re being swept out of Neepsend.
Walking by the Don, surrounded by the wreckage of this vanished world, I wondered whether the German phenomenologist was a sign of things to come in my own industry. For the past eleven years, writing has been my day job as well as my hobby. In that time, I’ve been a journalist, an SEO hack, a literary critic, an editor, and a ghostwriter (one contract, rather perversely, required me to be all of those things at once). I’ve also written a novel and put together an anthology of short fiction.
Perhaps I would soon be like the men who give blacksmithing demonstrations to school groups. Gather round, children, and look at the writer at his desk—notice the empty plates and coffee mugs, the way he slouches in his chair, the purple bags under his eyes. See how long it takes him to write a paragraph? Can you believe he made less than half a dollar a word? This is what writing was like in the olden days.
When OpenAI launched its first consumer-facing AI chatbot, ChatGPT, nearly three years ago, I didn’t pay much attention. But it wasn’t long before generative AI was being talked about in terms that were, to say the least, immoderate. It was going to transform education, health care, media, and tech; it was going to make us all insanely productive, cure cancer, and strengthen national security. It was going to become a kind of imminent god, a cybernetic superconsciousness.
Naturally, not everyone thought this was a good thing. There are plenty of arguments for why AI is a menace: there’s the accuracy argument (sometimes it makes things up), the plagiarism argument (the appropriation of data to train large language models is a massive violation of intellectual property law), the bias argument (it regurgitates the racism, ableism, and misogyny of the data on which it was trained), the environmental argument (it consumes a lot of energy), the workforce argument (it’ll make a lot of jobs redundant), the literacy argument (it will be hard to teach people to read if they have a machine that can do it for them), the quality-of-digital-life argument (it fills social media with AI slop), and........