The Threat Of AI To Writers

“I say this from my personal experience of how the new technology of the internet and digital programs rising in the 1990s destroyed the economy that made journalism feasible. People don’t want to pay for better quality information when they can get cheaper but lower quality information apparently free on the internet. I was working as a journalist in the mid-1990s when this was beginning to happen and I bailed in 1998 to start teaching in university. Since then, I’ve watched many media outlets either close or reduce jobs. Even my students are losing the jobs they got after graduation.

Now, universities are being hit hard by AI, like happened with the technology of the internet. As I know from last year, the cheating of students using AI to write assignments is increasing quickly and professors like me have no defence. If this continues, then university credentials will be worthless because employers won’t know who cheated with AI to get a degree. I retired in September at 72 because of a heart condition, feeling, at the time, the futility of fighting the student use of AI without increasing the teaching workload to unmanageable proportions. I am hearing the pain and futility now of the teachers I was working with last year.

I see this as the context for the dilemma of writers now. People can use AI to create faux books that consumers will buy because, like journalism and a university education, the market will be flooded with cheaply made faux products that satisfy a large segment of the population. This AI could dominate the book market by offering a cheaper product that writers who are creative and original can’t compete against. Like I said, I’ve already seen this happen with my former career as a journalist and I’ve seen it beginning to happen as a university professor.

You can’t stop the spread of AI technology in the publishing industry and attempting to outlaw it on this forum won’t produce the results that you want.

You need a bold and innovative survival plan that adjusts to the disruption of this new AI technology. Some journalists have found a solution to their similar dilemma by forming co-operative groups in what is a very competitive industry. Instead of competing against each other and thus dividing their resources and working against each other, they combine to work together. However, most of the journalism industry is sticking to its disastrous traditional model.

In the same way, being a book author is traditionally a solitary, competitive venture. That is both its strength and its weakness. A solitary author is up against the Goliath of AI technology. You know the story where David defeated his Philistine Goliath by a different strategy and a new technology, quick movement with a portable sling shot against slow, brute strength. Think of what an army of Davids could do. That’s exactly what happened on the battlefield. Light infantry and guerilla warfare defeated slow, ponderous, brute military strength.

I don’t know what the answer to the problem of Philistine AI technology is for writers. Opposing the Goliath on its own terms won’t work. If the strength of authorship is creativity and originality, then what is your creative and original solution? How do you outwit AI with a different strategy than simply trying to oppose the crass brute that it is? What’s the survival plan?”

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  • The image is David against Goliath by Gustave Dore, 1866, engraved by N. Monvoisin