AI-generated anything is a plague.

I know of businesses that have laid off their entire marketing teams and replaced them with ChatGPT. I've seen several instances of small presses being flooded with AI-generated content by people looking to make a quick buck, to the point of closing down submissions and making life harder for actual writers. There was even a post here not so long ago from a guy who self-published a book of poetry that was admittedly generated by ChatGPI, but he still claimed to be a writer.

I don't want to wander into the realm of the intersection of art and the human experience, but a program will never be able to generate a work with fresh depth and creative complexity. All it can do is regurgitate whatever it can access. It may be able to pull parts together, but it will never innovate or "create."

So it could probably churn out a few dozen James Patterson books in a week, but real writing ain't gonna happen on the back of a program.

I think AI could maybe replace trashy fiction which is already just formulaic nonsense for a cash grab, but I suspect it would never actually replace proper novels.

If they started doing that then I wouldn't even read those books. I'd rather read books written by a human.

I can see it happening fairly easily with kids' series that are already basically ghost-written (is it ghost writing if they're transparent about "Erin Hunter" being 6 people?)

But my favorite books explore the human experience in a way I don't believe AI can master anytime soon. Maybe that's wishful thinking.

AI has been able to write relatively complex stories for a while now. I remember reading about an AI-generated story winning a writing contest around 2015 or 2016, and I'm sure it had impressive capabilites even before that. Personally, I'm not overly worried. I think AI will have applications in the writing process, certainly, but it will still be a tool for writers, rather than something that replaces them completely. In general, I think that ought to be true for AI's relationship with humanity in general, provided we regulate the technology well and adjust our economic structure according to the new reality it brings--though that might be asking a lot from us, now that I think about it.

They're tools. ChatGTP can already write very complex things. But complex is not synonymous with good.

Most of these tools will replace people who had little to offer in the first place and be used by people who have a clear idea of their own added value and how to use tools to their best effect.

Used bookstores are already full of books nobody is reading. People choose to read things because of a shared human interest, and we've a hard enough time finding shared human interest with humans from the recent past--it's unlikely we're going to care about a bunch of new content when we're already ignoring the majority of existing content.

>Do you think that in the future can AI replace writers?

No. Do I think bad writers will be replaced - yeah. Content creation is dead. Only art will survive.

AI can't imagine. But it can put basic info into established structures. So James Patterson can let his ghostwriters go and use AI - I'm not sure his fans would see much difference.

Same with cheap TV scripts.

The only things that will survive the AI industrial revolution is genuine imagination and originality.

No but I think that it would be a way to get more specific fan fiction. I can look for fan fic and I'd still prefer human written stuff but if I'm looking for a specific idea and no one's written it I wouldn't mind telling an AI program to do so.

>Artificial Intelligence is a thing now.

No, it isn't. Chatbots are not AI, at least according to the traditional definition. They're clumsy plagiarism machines that are efficient at trawling the internet. That's it. There does not exist an artificially created intelligence that "thinks".

Ted Chiang has a great piece about this that everyone needs to read, because the discourse and understanding around this stuff has been absolutely abysmal lately.

We have machine knitting but people still knit. We have machine made pottery but people still hand make pottery. We will have AI writing but people will still write.

Yes, it is inevitable.

But it might take 10 years to replace 90% of the writers, and another decade to replace 99%.

Most writers will be AI-assisted soon, however.

I wish we didn't have to face this, but here we are (I'm an amateur writer myself and thinking of this ruins my motivation sometimes, TBH).

AI has been able to write stories for a long time now, like almost 15 years. This is not new. Those conversations have been around, but it just became popular topic to talk about. Give it couple months, people will end playing with new and shiny ChatGPD or whatever it's called, and move on to the next thing.

Writing is the easy part. Let’s see AI that can edit/proofread and go through the publishing process.

AI produces art on demand, catering to specific prompts and requests. Which some people will prefer. But there will also be readers who want to be challenged, and will read out of their comfort zone.

I kinda figured this would happen when I saw what ChatGPT was doing, and here we are. Please remember that it is not actually as smart as it appears.

Basically, what it is doing is stringing words together which statistically often go together, and then stringing those sentences together because they often go together. It is basically Google search suggestions, on steroids. You'll notice that it starts to lose the thread of what it was supposed to be saying after a couple paragraphs, and just rambles in bizarre digressions after that. One poster here, as a joke, had it write a short novel inspired by the comedy series Black Books, and discovered that they had to work on it chapter by chapter, regenerating each one until they got one which made some sort of thematic sense rather than just being idle rambling -- this was actually a pretty useful experiment for showing the limitations of the tool. Arguably, that poster was still "the real author," or at least a very heavy-handed editor, and the chatbot was a tool.

No, AI is not going to be writing novels anytime soon, unless you are fine with novels which are just meandering, unedited thoughts off the top of The Internet's head. So far it is just generating low-quality, 3-paragraph filler content which people were not expected to read in the first place, like press releases and reddit posts. People whipping up books and loading them onto Amazon are just looking to make a quick buck selling cheap junk, like they already did in previous years by just copy-pasting someone else's fan fiction.

ETA: I searched high and low for that post because credit is due, and apparently it was removed. Whatever, I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

Companies will try. Poorly written AI articles are already all over the internet. They will eventually be forcing AI written books down our throats I'm sure.

chatgpt writing and the like is very surface level. It typically has correct grammar but there's only as much thought put in as there is by a relatively new writer. You can definitely find middle schoolers writing at the level it outputs, and probably quite a few middle schoolers already past it.

It just doesn't seem to be able to understand how to combine ideas or rely on ideas from prior paragraphs/sections to forward a thesis. I also think most of the automated outputs I've seen have poor word choice and not much attention to the actual flow, language, etc. even when it's trained on language from writers who excel at that.

I wonder if even the pulpiest of books, for undiscerning audiences, could be suitably replicated by ai writing. Like I think even people with low standards for books currently have much higher standards than what it puts out. Maybe in a decade or something those writers may feel some pressure but I kind of doubt it

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I see at least 5 posts asking this question every day. Especially on copywriting subs. So boring now

If you're worried about being replaced by a robot... Idk what to say. You probably deserve it if it happens.