Will AI replace creative writers?
Image created by A. L. Peck using Canva.
A plethora of AI writing tools has populated the internet recently, causing writers to worry if their professions will be replaced. Even platforms like Canva have introduced AI writing tools. Theirs is called Magic Write and boasts the ability to “write anything from social media captions and profile bios to brainstorming and seeking inspiration for poems or letters with one single prompt.” These tools are compelling because they create decent-quality text in a matter of seconds. It’s easy to imagine how various writing professions (like SEO writing) will get outsourced to machines, but we’ll focus specifically on how creative writers (like novelists and poets) will be impacted.
Machine writing lacks a soul
One of the most impressive new AI tools is Chat GPT, a machine-learning model designed to generate human-like responses to questions and prompts. Translation: it’s a smart chatbot. You can ask it anything, including writing a story with certain specifications:
Chat GPT generated this story in several seconds, whereas it would have taken any writer much longer to think of, produce, and edit. And though the passage is coherent and sufficiently answers the request, it doesn’t tell a compelling story. I tried directing the chatbot to make the story more sophisticated and interesting, but the results were still bland. I wouldn’t pay to read this output, would you? While Chat GPT’s writing style will likely improve as AI improves, that doesn’t solve the problem of the stale plot.
The reason the story is inferior to a decent human writer’s boils down to the fundamental difference between humans and machines: emotion/soul. A good novelist or poet’s work conveys a feeling, emotion, experience, or idea in a way that is genuine to its essence. A machine will never be able to replicate this because it doesn’t have or understand emotions. Without this emotional connection, stories won’t resonate with people.
Imagine a machine describing the sadness at the death of a loved one or heartbreak. It would be cold and disingenuous because machines can’t feel sadness. Machines can take other peoples’ words and mesh them together, but they’re missing the soul that empathizes with and breathes life into characters, places, and stories.
While humans have experiences and perspectives that make their writing unique and relatable, machines lack unique identifiers. They work off the same datasets and are useful for logical questions and solutions. But the primary intent and effect of creative writing is not logic. Creative writing is about expressing and unveiling the human soul.
Using AI to improve drafts of poems or stories is counterproductive
To experiment, I pasted one of my draft poems into Chat GPT and asked it to improve the poem. It inserted lines and replaced words in a few places but otherwise kept the poem the same. I liked the idea of some of the insertions—they made sense thematically, though they didn’t match the poem’s existing tone. So, I went back and forth between my draft and Chat GPT’s output to incorporate some of the ideas while matching my poem’s tone. It ended up being a waste of time because I was merging two different writing styles, which resulted in an incoherent, jumbled poem.
Despite giving the tool my writing style and tone, it produced a poem where the writing style and tone were mixed to the point where it didn’t make sense and was unusable. I also found Chat GPT’s insertions and replacements emotionless, straightforward, and bland, which is not what you want for a poem!
I wouldn’t recommend using Chat GPT for creative writing because it ends up being a waste of time merging two different styles.
How writers can leverage AI tools
Now that doesn’t mean writers should avoid using AI tools. If an AI tool generates a solid draft, shouldn’t a human writer just refine it? I don’t think it’s wise to have these tools generate long-form text. If you’re using AI to write the bulk of your text, your most valuable contribution is your ideas. Say you’re writing a novel and outsource a chapter to Chat GPT—this means a machine is deciding your chapter’s plot using existing information and storylines, which is stale and unimaginative.
It’s better to use it for shorter texts, like paragraphs, where you can ask specific questions and get a more tailored result. You can also ask Chat GPT to proofread or improve a paragraph you wrote. Though I wouldn’t take all of its suggestions and it currently spits out a lot of errors (this will improve over time as the technology improves).
Here are some other ways I find Chat GPT useful:
Research: Google overwhelms users with too many choices, whereas Chat GPT spits out one or a few definitive answers. It’s a good dictionary and thesaurus for this reason.
Rhymes: You can add multiple conditions to queries. For instance, you can ask for a word that rhymes with “bright” and is a food item.
Interpretations: If I’m unsure whether a metaphor I wrote makes sense in a poem, I can ask GPT to interpret it and see if the interpretation matches my intent.
Another AI writing tool that I highly recommend is Grammarly. You can paste your text into a document and Grammarly will flag grammatical and syntax errors as well as provide the correction. It also highlights sentences that are too wordy or complex.
These types of tools will free up writers to focus more on developing their ideas. The writers who survive the machine learning revolution will be those who produce original ideas and make unique connections while infusing emotion into their work. Good ideas will become more valuable while mundane work is outsourced.
What AI writing tools risk
Writing is crucial to crystallize your thoughts and understanding of concepts and ideas. It reveals your gaps in knowledge and forces you to convey your ideas logically and cohesively. Creative writing also serves as an outlet for expression and connection. All of that will be lost if the writing process is outsourced to machines.
A lingering concern I have is if society’s level of sophistication and intelligence will regress until AI language is the average level of intelligence (with all the answers at your fingertips, people will have far fewer incentives to learn or do). This means people might not understand or value the more sophisticated human output.
If you liked this post, check out these:
The job of the novelist (according to Ayn Rand)
“God’s Language” and fiction’s inability to reinvent the past