Not the most intellectual contribution but I saw a meme (lol) that said something along the lines of, "in the past they pictured a future wherein we implemented ai to do menial tasks so people could be free to explore their passion. Instead we'll implement ai to do artistic tasks to people can be free to do menial tasks." I'm sure I'm butchering that interpretation but it's a bleak interpretation of late stage capitalism, imo.

AI can be trained on a huge number of art and can simulate the style of an author/poet. However AI can't create their own art, they can only create derivative art. Even than as the AI doesn't understand what's it's doing it'll likely have nonsensical parts, especially if it's a longer work. So it's basically creates glorified fanart.

If AI can reach general intelligence, so it actually understands what it's doing, then it can create new art. That said it's questionable if AI can reach general intelligence (it is possible, but not 100% sure) and if it reaches it, than when will it be.

Some of them. I reckon those authors who employ a stable of ghost writers to churn out works under their name would be able to make use of these so called "AI"s.

Write your own stories you nerds, or leave it to the people who know what they’re doing. You don’t need to use a machine to mine their work for alleged original content.

For as long as humans have been we have told each other stories. A disturbing number of folk seem perfectly happy to abdicate one of our fundamental traits to so called artificial “intelligence”. So, thank you for your sterling efforts Dostoevsky, Dickens, Shakespeare, Angela Carter, the Brontë sisters et al. We distilled your essence into algorithms, your services are no longer required.

I think that it's important to realize that "AI Art" of all kinds aren't working alone. None of them are, on anything large scale.

• A human requests a specific thing that they are interested in. They instigate the process.
• The AI churns out a ton of different results, some awful, some mediocre, some good, because they don't know the difference.
• A human sifts through all the results, picking through the good and the bad to find something that they personally thing is worth using.
• (optional) A human might tweak the final result to make it better and more interesting.

Many new tools have changed industries, like the printing press or electric drill or overhead crane, often changing the number of workers needed and how they are used. AI is the same, and it's probably not going away.

Complaining about AI is like complaining about digital art vs physical painting. Yes, photoshop changed a ton of things. Does that mean that photoshop should be banned? Or is it just a tool?

AI will change a lot of things. However, all progress does that. I don't think that AI will simply "replace authors". They'll simply change part of the process in some situations.

No, AI can't really replace any Creator role. It can be a pretty good tool to help come up with or flesh out new ideas in a way that is consistent with successful projects.

Something about monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare

Genuinely, why would anyone be interested in a book like that?

Don't AI basically regurgitate stolen material, slightly reworded? I would think the odds of an AI novel containing copywrited passages would be too high for any publisher to take a chance on. Unless I am misunderstanding

Oh, yes. They could write prose fiction that rivals human intellect. As I recently read about in Blindsight, by Watts, there's this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room thing.

An AI will never write the stories I have in my head.

Unfortunately, whether or not I will ever write those stories is rather key for me, personally.

Authors will probably evolve to use AI in their writing process. Maybe they'll write some key scenes and an outline, look at the options chatgpt spits out for the scenes they're having trouble writing, select and tweak passages. Maybe seeing the options will spark new ideas. Either way, AI can only work off of data that it was fed. I am actually really curious to see what an AI trained on extremely prolific writers like Terry Pratchett or Stephen King would come back with, but there will always be a need for an author's sense for good writing and the overall flow of the piece.

Presumably the same arguments about training sets and compensation will also happen with prose. For the record, I do think non public domain artists should be compensated in some way for having their work used in a data training set. Doubly so if it's a set that's exclusively their work (ie. telling AI to generate a painting in the style of Greg Rutkowski).

Automation in its current ability to replace labor is rather ubiquitous. It doesn't replace a means of labor entirely as much as it diminishes the work necessary to ultimately provide the good or service - think what the industrial did for farming over the centuries and how labor shifted in regards there. Before the industrial revolution we had an agrarian economy where almost everyone farmed. Now practically nobody does but products of which are provided more than ever.

AI allows anyone to write with a similar style to that of another currently so long as there is enough of a sample size to provide to train the AI. I don't think AI will replace the best writers of fiction but it will be used as a tool to produce similar content quicker. Depending on the type of fiction this will be easier to do but for creating unique narratives AI will likely not provide as much assistance beyond some form of a useful template. Ai or automation in general is more likely to reduce work towards documentation or perhaps non-fiction pieces.

If you’ve ever tried an AI art generator then you’ll understand that the AI isn’t performing the act of creation, only the act of production.

A few years back, people never imagined that AI could take over the design world. Therefore, one never knows when the prose would be generated in just a click. ChatGPT is just a glimpse of it.

Several years ago an AI wrote a truly magical HP-inspired fanfiction called 'The Handsome One'. It's .. interesting.

I think authors are safe for a while longer.

AI can replace anything I think. It's just a matter of time.

Doubt it could publish faster than Stephen King though. 🙂

If they write like Colleen Hoover, yes.

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The question is whether we’ll care

The short answer is no, or at least not today.

The current AI writers are somewhere between bad to mediocre. Like one passed an MbA exam but that’s honestly speaking more to the difficulty of MBA exams.

The writing prompts are basically all just making reasonable sounding but wrong essays right now. They can mimic writing styles if that’s something included in the data inputs that were used to train it. It’s kind of like a scenario where they can be good as displaying information but they are not actually good at imparting knowledge and creative thought is not really quantifiably possible for machine learning, though they can probably approach a scary degree of mimicry.

Like I know we call it AI,but that’s only because it’s a more public ally understood concept in entertainment. Reall it’s just machine learning algorithms… and we can’t even get those to give good Spotify recommendations.

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There is a recent example of a childrens picture book creating entirely using AI that raised some interesting questions. I’d also recommend checking out Artificial Fandom Intelligence, an episode of the Fansplaining podcast. They are looking at it from a fanfiction/fan works perspective but raise lots of good questions for those only interested in traditionally published work as well. Last link - did you know there are already people using AI for audiobooks?? Check out that story here.

Sorry for the link dumping; I’ve just come across lots of interesting AI related stories lately!

I just listened to a podcast where it said a rabbi put in scripture reference and tradition and the sermon spit out he read at synagogue and then told those listening he didn’t write it and to guess who did. And most guessed a rabbi who is know as a great orator.

Wild!

Even when you can, you really need the human hand in there or it goes haywire bonkers.

A few posts back on my profile I have some samples where I asked a novel writing AI to write Watership Down as a few different authors. Little to no additional guidance. It's entertaining but it will be a long time before it's making anything worth publishing.

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Eventually yes, but AI being able to really recreate human stories is still quite a ways off.

Rival human intellect? Yes, certainly. Rival human emotion? I doubt it. And that's the key for me. Stories, for me, are mostly about emotions.

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Yes, and it can't not happen.

We know two things about writing:

1. Almost all (and some would argue a strong "all") fictional writing is rehashing ideas we've already had in genres already defined. Some of our stock characters go back to the ancient Sumerians. We change some names and some locations, maybe the precise details, but all a modern author does is put flesh on existing bones to create a new story. A good story is primarily how well an author can do this derivation.
2. We have AI models which can rate stories. For movies, they're almost as good as human critics (and agree with them), while for the written word they're not as good as human critics - but still closely agree with them.

Given the two precepts above, we aren't that far from an AI model able to generate long-form stories. AIs work, like humans do, on their knowledge, which is primarily what it was taught is the state of the art. At the moment, a home-PC ready AI (e.g. Stable Diffusion) is able to store approximately the same volume of knowledge about a given field that a human can.

With a ratings capability, this closes the loop, and the AI knows how to get better.

AIs are also capable of innovation humans are not as they can spot derivations and inferences at a much greater distance and use a larger data set at any one time: Your working memory is limited, an AI's isn't. If you try to think of an AI model as "just a dumb machine following its programming", you're deceiving yourself.

For example, with enough data an AI could reconstruct a "most likely artist" based on commentary and influence. If Artist A began a movement, influencing Artist B, C, D, while being commented on in the works of Author A and B, the AI can analyse that and create works which would be along Artist A's style. AIs are better at doing this than humans are. Way better. This can also be run backwards, to find what future author would be influenced by any given authors... Which is how AIs work today (for the most part)... and how humans work.

Today's AI models get worse the more you study then, they have the general idea, but don't understand finer concepts, like the Wright Flyer or the Model T. There's no reason that tomorrow's AI would be so limited.

I’m sure AI can replace many of the really trash books that are churned out (looking at you Kindle Unlimited).

The masters of writing though, I doubt any AI can emulate their style or their mind bending twists. Writing prose is also about using very unique ideas ways to describe a situation, a place, a character. It builds and builds upon itself which I think AI is still lacking in.

It could 100% replace y/a authors and other generic books but not literature or poetry.

Yeah, it's really a matter of when, not if. And the rate of advancement (and investment) into AI has been explosive in the last few years.

AI poetry has been done well enough to fool people. Longer forms of writing like essays have been done. A novel isn't so far off I'd say.

If a machine can do someone's job, then there won't be as many people needed for that job. Take making clothes, for example. We have massive amounts of machines that take the raw materials, convert to fabric, sew into clothes. But there is still room for bespoke goods that command a much higher price.

So yeah, a lot of authors won't be able to sell their books. Their ideas won't be as interesting, as well written, or have as much mass appeal. But some will still be successful.

The people who should be the most worried are the people most replaceable, the bottom rung.

Capital goods have that effect. But overall, it's a good thing. More people will have access to more books, for cheaper. You could tell an AI what kind of book you want to read, and get it within minutes, maybe seconds.

Truth is, authors are successful when people want to read their stories. AI can't stop that from happening. If they want to write, they can. If they produce work worse than billions of other books, well, blaming a machine won't solve anything.

I wonder how many artists or authors complaining about this are willing to stop using alarm clocks in favor of paying someone to come beat on the outside of their windows to wake them up heh

The idea that AI won't be able to replace creators is naive. Of course it will. It will 100% be able to and it will do it better than people can imagine.

Decent AI will eventually be able to take all of the data you throw at it including all the books/stories/movies/people/places/trips etc you've loved and hated in the past and churn out a perfectly tailored story just for you and you will completely love it.

AI will communicate with other AI and learn faster and better than humans ever would be able it. It could take every story ever written since the beginning of recorded time and use all of it as inspiration. No human could ever replicate that.

There will likely be different categories, Human authors and AI authors. And some staunch holdouts will always complain that humans are better for some bullshit reason.