In October, 2023 Wired published a piece from the author Vauhini Vara titled, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer.” In the essay, Vara discusses her experiments with AI, how it’s generated content has gotten purposefully worse over time, and dives into the different perspectives on AI’s use.
Specifically, she cites conversations with authors that use AI as a tool to facilitate their writing process. One author and literary critic, Adam Dalva, uses DALL-E to generate scenes that he’s imagining, then uses that as a reference for his writing. Another author, Jenny Xie, uses AI to generate parts of her narrative. Outside of Vara’s examples, I’ve heard of authors using AI to write the parts they struggle with or, in some cases, just don’t like writing. Descriptions of scenery, descriptions of people–mostly description that is necessary to paint a scene for a reader but is only ever tangentially related to the story.
Vara goes on to discuss Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” within the context of AI. The essay discusses the oftentimes vast difference in reader interpretation vs. author intent, and argues that the reader interpretation is more important. If this is true, then something like ChatGPT can generate something tailored to a specific reader, rendering an author useless at best, unnecessary at worse. Some people, like a mother Vara references in the essay, have already taken that step:
“But what if I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.”
– Vauhini Vara, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer”
Vara touches on several other perspectives in her essay and ultimately concludes that AI lacks the human touch that separates art from product. This made me think of the tens of thousands of words I’ve read about AI over the past two years, and how few of them have talked about why readers read, and why writers write.
There are plenty of dangers with AI–the loss of creative opportunities for genuine artists, the commercialization of art, rich tech bros becoming richer off of stolen work and poor product, the degradation of literature and, ultimately, language, etc.–but one I haven’t seen grappled with is the loss of human-to-human connection. The reason I read and write is to connect with people. After language was invented, storytelling was one of the first things people did. What does it mean for our connections across time and distance if everything we read is partially or even fully a machine construct made up of recycled material?
The value of storytelling is in its perspective (something that Vara discusses in her essay), which, by its nature, is something AI cannot have regardless of how much data it is trained on. We read stories (or essays, or newspaper articles, or memoirs, or histories, or whatever) to immerse ourselves in a different perspective. Writing has always connected us. It’s how we know what it was like living in 1500s Spain. It’s how we know, in a very real, detailed way, what it was like to be a slave. It’s how we exchange information, ideas, and experiences. On more than one occasion writing has changed the world. These things happened because the person behind the writing synthesized their perspective, their experience, their morals, their humanity onto a page for others to pick up and see themselves in.
If authors start heavily using AI to generate their content, or if readers use AI to create individually tailored stories for themselves, eventually the only content AI will have to continuously train itself will be content generated by other AIs. This could realize and actual version of the dead internet. The experiences and perspectives that we’ll read in AI-generated literature will no longer reflect who we are. It may, at best, reflect who we were. But even that is probably a stretch.
I’m not one of those people that thinks AI has no place in authorial pursuits. I think it’s a tool that can be used well or can be used poorly. What worries me is the all or nothing thinking from the consumer, and the replacement mindset of the tech bros. My sole reason for reading and writing is to connect with other people. To learn from them, to understand them better, to feel like I’m not so alone.
I don’t want to see a future where that connection is lost.
