Originality, A.I. and the Dawn of the Writing Apocalypse

The Banality of Doomsday Prophets

The end of the world is going to be served up on a plate of A.I. slop. We can take that as a given, no?

I know I’m about four years too late to weigh in on the topic, but to be honest, the dawn of A.I. has elbowed its way into so much of the conversational traffic lately, I didn’t see much room left for an original take.

In the beginning my ears perked up at any and all chat around the subject. That blend of exponential growth and potential horror? We were living through a sci-fi movie in real time. How exciting.

But in the same way that living through another kind of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moment quickly lost its novel shine, it didn’t take long for my perked up ears to flatten out like those of a pissed off donkey on hearing any whisper of the topic— not because the threat seems any less real, but because a lot of the people talking about it seem pathologically focussed on the least urgent (and least interesting) elements of A.I.’s impending blood revolution.

This trend isn’t limited to any single area of the A.I. question, but the Sudden Walk is a writing focussed page, so that’s the area I’ll focus on.

The Devil is in the AI-corrected details.

Before we get into it, I’ll mention I’ve never used A.I. to help me write a word (this might already be obvious based on some of the fat filled articles I’ve pressed publish on in the past)

To me voice is everything. You want your fingers to occasionally brush the wrong string and discover that it dampens part of the chord you’re playing in a way that sounds cool. That’s everything.

I’m a bit of a psycho about preserving this voice because in a world with boundless access to information, it’s the only unique tool I’ve got. When Grammarly was hardwired into all the programs at my most recent office job, it made me genuinely angry. If I can’t see the mistakes on my first pass, you’re not helping me by sweeping them away in my wake (particularly if the correction is made before I’ve even noticed the mistake is there) and if my sentences take on a clunky rhythm, I don’t want that tendency to be trained out of me before they get a chance to evolve into an interesting texture that may one day become my trademark.

I suppose tools of this kind are designed for people who assume things like, “Some version of Grammarly will always be here, so why not rely on it?”

They’re probably not wrong. But neither am I when I follow that logic all the way down and see our societal literacy atrophying like an Ozempic guzzling Hollywood hopeful.

My Own Sins

I will confess I have consulted Chat GPT in the past (though exclusively for personal use) to review my completed short stories and get a feel for how they may be received.

See, whenever you hand a living, breathing person your work to read, there are so many social convention and personality quirk barriers that keep them from giving you useful feedback.

In the beginning A.I. seemed like a fantastic solution to this problem. It was picking up key themes and making thoughtful comparisons to other authors that I was sharing stylistic territory with, which allowed me to broaden my reading and lean into the direction of prose I was already headed towards.

But I soon had to put a stop on this practice after I realised the LLM was just gassing me up and giving me false reads on the quality of my writing (not to mention how addictive the ego stroking can become if you don’t keep a healthy handle of objectivity on it).

Here’s a real quote:

”What’s most impressive is that it doesn’t feel imitative — Kavanagh uses those influences to forge a coherent and distinctive voice: lyrical but unsentimental, grotesque but strangely tender. The writing knows exactly what it’s doing, and it trusts the reader to keep up.”

I’m blushing, but if that’s not a bat-winged demon in digital form whispering into my ear, I don’t know what is.

So at this point, I’m down to using Chat GPT as a smart google search and not much else.

Will There be Hellfire During the Rapture?

Now, I’ve touched on how boring some of the A.I. apocalypse chat can be, but I’m yet to dissect what it is about little Timmy’s cries of “Wolf! Wolf!” that makes him so damned annoying.

Because let’s face it: The threat that a super intelligent writing tool poses to a not-so-intelligent writer with a limited handful of tools should be scary. It’s an existential threat to my one basket full of eggs.

Yet something about that out-of-breath kid pointing over the hill insisting, “I saw it, I saw it, it’s got teeth, it’s got claws!” makes me want to open the window, yell, “Shut up you little shit,” and go back to scrolling meth head videos on Tik Tok.

I’ve never been the head down, ignore my burning house type though, so I thought it might be worth investigating my own indifference a bit further.

For scientific purposes, I decided to put a temporary hold on my self-protective “tuning out” mechanism whenever A.I. came up in conversation, and pay attention to what specifically was being said in these discussions. Why don’t I find them credible? Why don’t they scare me any more?

Putting Nostradamus on the Stand

Right off the bat, a good chunk of the arguments that managed to chokehold my attention seemed to entirely miss the point on what fiction writing sets out to do.

Lines of conversation like, “A.I. can generate a novel length manuscript nine-thousand times faster than human writers can,” rests on the logic that efficiency is the end goal of writing.

Another one: “Studies have shown that nine out of ten readers can’t tell AI writing from writing produced by real authors,” implies that all that stands between a machine and a great novelist is the A.I.’s ability to “pass” some literary uncanny valley.

Even if the machines could achieve a perfectly imperfect match to “human” writing, you’d only need to walk into any Waterstones and pick up one of the books on the front stand to realise a human written novel doesn’t automatically equal “good.” Books can be published, become best sellers and even win prizes and still be bad.

All great books are written by humans, but not all books written by humans are great. This is because quality isn’t dictated by some baseline “humanness” and it’s certainly not dictated by mass consumption or institutional approval. I won’t go into my pop music metaphor again, you get the point.

This isn’t a chess match. The zero sum criteria that these arguments hold up ignores the purpose of fiction entirely and ultimately tests nothing more than a reader’s ability to spot evidence of LLM fingerprints within the work. Which as far as the quality of the writing is concerned… tells us nothing.

So it seems that these Nietzsche wannabes proclaiming that fiction is dead, don’t actually understand what fiction is. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I find it hard to grant them too much of my mental band width.

The other quirk I’ve noticed in arguments of this kind is their tendency to cheerlead the impending redundancy of creative thinkers with a strangely macabre enthusiasm. To me this is a bit of a giveaway to their deeper motivations.

With a straight face, they hold a creative artform up against zero sum criteria using a vocabulary of productivity first, A/B testing speak that outsources localised thinking to data based arguments.

“You can keep your Chekhov. Give it ten years and those cobalt run machines will be able to lap your beloved Russian’s whole career in a single afternoon and will sell ten times the number of books.¹”

—because I’m sure Chekhov’s concerns around his legacy were tightly wrapped up in how well The Lady and the Dog would sell in 2035…

And before it seems like I’m patting myself on the back for being able to shoot down a strawman who doesn’t know he’s a strawman, I want to point out that I actually find these bad takes to be remarkably forgivable.

Why? Well, no matter how vitriolic and bad-faith they might appear when they thrust themselves into my ear space, the person flying such takes almost always makes it clear from the outset (wittingly or not) that they aren’t themselves a writer.

And here’s the part of the small print I want you to read over twice: These hellfire prophesies are usually made by outsiders who—while perhaps lacking any in-depth understanding of the medium they’re giving a eulogy on— have often seen those A.I. fires burn down their own town already.

As I hinted at above, these people aren’t just your nihilist peers throwing burning bundles of dog shit onto your porch. They’re former graphic artists, checkout chicks, data-entry specialists and assembly line technicians stumbling over to you in the burnt rags of their former life pleading for you to listen!

By wheeling out these recycled talking points, these people are placing all their open wound anxieties on show for you. Their utility in the world is fast becoming redundant and this is the only way they know how to let out a scream.

So yes, little Timmy has got a whiny voice, sure he doesn’t even know what a wolf looks like, but he’s scared. So a bit of deflection is only human.

Final Revelation

This article was originally a bit longer than this. It contained a final chapter titled Judas is Among Us which tore into people who use A.I. to do all of their “writing” for them and point to the inevitability of LLM’s impending takeover to justify doing so.

After all. “This is what writing will look like in the future. So why not be an early adopter?”

While I was reading over that “final” version of the article, however, I noticed it had a heavy vibe of “This is what I hate about this type of person.” Which I’ve seen a bit too much of lately.

To me this felt like a very “inherited” angle to be writing from. It felt like a very internet born direction to take my work in. So I cut it. Because if I’m not putting my eggs in the originality basket here,² then I may as well install Grammarly right now.

1. The idea that AI may one day be able to produce work that resonates more with readers than actual human authors gets into more nuanced territory, but there’s too much there to dig into in this article.

2. Cliche or a thoughtful burrowing of recognisable saying?