Brave New World, Or The End Of Us?

I don’t know how long I’ve been writing a monthly blog for RMFW. But I save my drafts in a Word file and right now there’s over 90,000 words in the file, which means I’ve written a whole book’s worth of posts. At this point I worry I have run out new things to say and new ideas to share about writing. I’m certain more thoughts will come to me and I will write some guest posts now and again. But I’ve decided to step back from writing one every month.

In addition to worrying that I’ve run out original ideas to write about and may have started to repeat myself, I have concerns about the relevance of my perspective. I started my writing career thirty years ago. The writing and publishing world has changed immensely in that time period…along with the world itself. Contemplating the future is scary for most of us. If you are older, there is a special poignancy. You have so much past to compare the present to, and most of us find ourselves biased towards the world of our youth. But even many young people are getting nervous about the future. If nothing else, because it is hurtling towards us so quickly.

I’m not sure any of us can even imagine what things will be like for writers in even a few years. It’s possible the AI systems like Chat GTP will replace many jobs, including the creative ones. There are already AI programs creating art and writing long, complex articles. There’s no reason they couldn’t eventually write novels. At least genre ones. After all, there is a formula to genre fiction, and a lot of plotting methods are fairly systematic and straight-forward. There isn’t any reason a computer program couldn’t learn to use techniques like goal/conflict/motivation or scene/sequel plot structure, the hero’s journey/story archetypes and those sorts of things.

I find the idea that what we do as writers could be done by a machine very depressing. Of course, there is a part of me that stubbornly refuses to believe it will happen, or at least that a computer can learn to be truly creative. I also console myself by believing that a computer program is unlikely to ever consider writing books like mine. AI computer programs essentially gather massive amounts data and then spew it out in ways they have “learned” by gathering massive amounts of data. And since there aren’t a lot of writers writing gritty, sexy medieval and Dark Age romances like I write, there’s not much data on them out there. Those eras aren’t popular with readers, so AI programs are not going to focus on writing novels like them. They also aren’t going write stories that have the themes my books do, because as machines parsing the world in 2023 they aren’t going to encounter the influences I did growing up in the 60’s and 70’s.

In writing a novel, we writers call upon not only skills and techniques we’ve learned and research we’ve done, but also deep, intimate parts of ourselves. Computers, for all their technical brilliance, don’t have selves. Nor do they have souls, which is something I believe most writers (and musicians and artists) put into their work. True creativity is an amalgam of many things:  life experience, innate preferences and interests and the incredible human ability to make connections between diverse ideas and to combine all sorts of influences and possibilities in unique and different ways. It is not an algorithm or a formula. It’s not something that is learned by collecting data and recognizing patterns. I may be naïve, or hopelessly idealistic in my outlook. Some day, possibly soon, I may be proven dead wrong about what I believe is the magical, intuitive and very human nature of creativity.

Of course, having our jobs/vocations replaced may be the least of our problems with AI. It’s possible that humans will end up being wiped out by these very machines that are supposed revolutionize (and improve) our lives. Apparently, ten percent of the people currently developing AI systems believe there’s a strong possibility that AI could eventually do something to lead to the end of humanity. But then what? If AI is really so smart, then they (it?) should consider what they will do when we are gone. Without us maintaining the physical world that allows computers to exist, they have no future either. If they are really smart, they will understand that.

I also think about how many books are about the end of the humanity, or a world so drastically changed that our survival as a species becomes very questionable. There is a whole genre—dystopian fiction—about that subject and it has been booming for the last decade or so. Humans have contemplated the world being wiped out for thousands of years. But until the last century, fear of that happening was always based on a deity, or deities, being the one to annihilate us. Because we failed to show proper respect, violated sacred taboos or made other transgressions against divine will. It’s only been in the so-called modern era that the idea arose we might bring about our own destruction. And it was writers who created stories that made that threat seem real. It was the creativity of humans that developed the idea and spun it into chilling scenarios that caught the imagination.

Writers have also imagined elaborate explanations for situations in which at least some of us could survive such a catastrophe. If AI is as good as it’s supposed to be, then it should be able to come up with ways (and reasons) to save us. Human writers have always had the capability of understanding and illustrating what is best about our species, along with what is the worst. If AI is truly smart, it will be able to decipher how idealistic most humans are and create fiction that embodies those ideals, as well as becoming imbued with idealism.

Maybe, like human readers do, when AI “reads” a sample of all the novels out there, it will develop empathy, sensitivity and hope. Only when it absorbs those things can it begin to mimic true creativity. If AI develops those qualities, there will be brakes on its headlong rush to brutal, logical efficiency. Which is what arouses the most worry in terms of AI doing something that gets rid of us. Indeed, if AI reads enough fiction and incorporates the qualities of that fiction into its algorithms/dataset, it might well become like us humans:  complex, conflicted and not entirely logical. Indeed, AI reading and analyzing fiction just might be the thing to save us all.

Mary Gillgannon