writing is old fashioned
a screed about AI because it scares the crap out of me.
A lot of writers right now are wondering if we are, in fact, getting lost in the tech shuffle, being left behind—or worse—replaced.
A friend made a joke the other day when I asked how her writing was going that “we’re all going to be replaced in 2-5 years anyway” by AI. This is a harrowing prospect to entertain, as evidenced by the many, many writers actively voicing their opinions about the subject of their work being used to “educate” AI, and the lawmakers trying to stop this.
why do we still do it?
If the tech billionaires of the world truly believe that writers can be easily supplanted by machines, why continue writing at all?
This is a question I’ve asked myself so often and in so many forms that it’s beginning to turn into word mush. The only answer I’ve managed to come up with is:
Because I can’t not do it.
Even when I’m at my least productive, I’m writing notes to myself on my phone or in a notebook, and jotting down ideas that will probably end up going nowhere. My brain is like a pinball machine where the ideas fall and sometimes I’m coordinated enough to hit the flipper button. Most of the time, they fall back into the chute.
Even when I’m not writing, I’m still navigating the world as a writer.
I still see things from the same interested, people-watching, “tell me more about your random weird relative” point of view I’ve always had. I still want to write things down. That’s not going away anytime soon.
I don’t consider myself a Luddite even though I do own a number of typewriters. Technology can be the friend of the writer in many ways. For example: I tend to have some of my best breakthroughs when I’m driving my car and unable to physically jot the idea down. I got an Apple Watch several years ago, and I installed a voice recorder app onto it so I can at least get the idea out of my head before it disappears. Do I look silly talking into my wrist? Yeah, but I remember when the Jawbone first came out, and nothing will ever look as stupid as that thing.
I use Scrivener instead of Word. I use an online thesaurus. I do so much random Googling that whatever hive-mind is collecting all of our data probably thinks I’m planning an elaborate trip to Scotland for next Christmas (a hint about my novel WIP there).
So, yeah, AI might be everywhere, but I see writers speaking up about it, too. That gives me hope. I heartily believe that AI is an affront to everything writers work so hard to do, and the years we put into learning how to do it effectively. I really don’t want to get into a Turing Test discussion here because I personally don’t care to think about android ethics. Ethicists and scholars are out there writing papers on that topic so that I don’t have to. What I care about is that a sector of society wants to weed out what makes humans inherently creative and replace it with something that can write faster, to make more money. That doesn’t sound like progress to me; that sounds like Eugenics.
We’re so obsessed with speed, efficiency, productivity that we’ve barreled past quality as a useful metric for determining whether a thing is worthy of our time and money. Some writers can make a book happen in three months; others need years. Why do we care so much about the timeline if the product is worth it?
Maybe I’m just shouting into the void to self-soothe, but I truly believe that there will always be writers and artists and makers. And because there will always be writers, there will always be other people who want to read.
