Does AI eradicate the need for writers?

AI generated art.

An English teacher, Natalie Kay, wrote about the rising difficulty to “The College Essay is Dead” posed by ChatGPT and like programs.

(Natalie Kay   Dec 9, 2022, https://medium.com/predict/ai-is-here-and-its-harming-future-generations-and-the-present-ones-cf40985b9bbf)

This time last year, I was in the middle of my one-year stint as a
high school English teacher. There were many reasons I left the job
(the teacher shortage exists for a reason, it turns out), but
undoubtedly one of the most significant ongoing issues I had was
plagiarism.

I tried it myself using ChatGPT, the AI program he discusses in the
article. I used a prompt that I had given to my own students when I
asked them to write essays on Romeo and Juliet. The quality and level
of detail was similar to that of my students. Even if I had been
suspicious of plagiarism, I never would have found a way to prove that
a student didn’t write the essay. It passed in every way I know to
look for. 

I’m grieving a world where my students, and future generations
broadly, are not going to be able to experience the satisfaction and
self-growth that school should foster. The new capabilities of
technology, the pressure from academic institutions, and the
drastically changing job market will create environments with few
incentives for critical thinking. Why learn to write anything when AI
will do it for us? Why spend years cultivating a particular technique
as an artist when AI can reproduce the same style in seconds? Why
learn math when AI can do the calculations? Why think critically when
another Intelligence has the answers needed to pass the test or do the
assignment? Why learn to do any of this if the AI will take over our
jobs anyway?

I can understand the teacher's frustration, but the reason we teach students to write essays isn't because we need to judge them, but so they can actually learn to write essays. We judge the essays only to judge whether the students have learned this.

When I was in college a scandal broke wherein students had been paying others to write their essays. All AI does is make this ability available to poor students as well as rich students.

The answer is that the students need to write the essays in class, which, by the way, is how I had to take most of my own exams. I hated it, because I hated writing under pressure, but in retrospect, I see it was the best way to ensure no cheating. Kay also comes to this conclusion. She makes some great suggestions how to stop cheating.

Here's another way: instead of a generic essay on Romeo and Juliet, have the students write a version of the story themselves, or at least find a more recent original interpretation, like my shifter love story An Enchanted Halloween, and write a comparison of Shakespeare's to the new version. AI uses existing content to emulate; if there are no essays to emulate, the AI will fail in obvious ways. 

Now, this does make national essay contests and the like difficult. I don't know if there also needs to be another layer added, like a cross-examination on a video call by the judges... but I don't think it's insurmountable.

The heart of the issue is that most student essays are similar to computer generated material in a key way: they regurgitate in new words the ideas they've read elsewhere. And that's a necessary step to learning, but it isn't the final step. The final step is creativity, and the application of new words to new ideas. 

The student doesn't stop needing to learn those steps just because computers do. That would be like saying that because we've taught robots to walk, we should stop teaching toddlers to walk. Sure, all toddlers from now on could simply ride on the backs of robo-dogs, never needing to walk again... but why should they?

Every computer program, every robot, every AI yet created is still no different than a stone hand-ax, an arrow or a fire stone. It's an extension of the human using it. Does it change the competitive landscape for all humans? Heck yeah, just as some anthropoid tribes learning to use axes, arrows and controlled fire made everything more competitive for all the other anthropoids around them.

None of these AIs are creatively writing essays because they have a point to make. But if one wants to take it there, that doesn't invalidate human experience, learning, or creativity, any more than meeting another individual who has ideas, art, thought and creativity of her own invalidates YOUR own or any individual's own experience.

By the way, AI is also going to greatly affect art. Maybe there, it will have good impact. My art history professor claimed that Modernist artists gave up on the millennia old Western artistic tradition of trying to paint realistic and beautiful images because the invention of photography made it too easy to for any old rube to create realistic and beautiful images. 

Many predicted that photography meant the end of human-created art.

That didn't happen. But a lot of idiots did paint deliberately ugly pictures for a century. We can't blame the cameras for that decision, however. No one HAS to be a modernist artist. It's a choice. A bad one, but a choice. 

Look at the AI generated art for the input, "Prince and Princess." Could a human have created something this hideous? Sure. Ugliness is still pursued by several schools of "high" art and fashion. But now any computer program can do the same.

Has this eliminated the need for beautiful, creative art?

Nope.

Let's say that AI next tackle fiction and can churn out reasonable stories. (Or stories as good as the stuff that's been coming out of Hollywood lately, which is a much lower bar.) Would that mean novelists should stop writing?

I see the same attitude everywhere these days. Eight billion people in the world--too many! Aliens--must be a threat! AI--why bother doing anything if a program can do it?

Just imagine if you discovered that the universe of Arcana Glen was real, and there were nine more realms of existence filled with elves and dragons and shifters, all creating their own enchanted songs. Would you stop singing?

What if the universe of Roxy Hood were true, and our dimension was only the cradle of newborn souls, which are immortal and live in infinite other dimensions, so that all of the greatest artists, playwrights, novelists, thinkers and geniuses of the past were still alive, somewhere, and still writing and inventing, only on a much more sophisticated level now that they have centuries of experience? You'd be 'competing' with Shakespeare's sit-coms and DaVinci's drones and Michael Angelo's interior design. Oh no, woe is you!

All these arguments founder on the same fallacy.

My dear friends, if a writer stopped writing because someone--or something--else can write better stories, no writer alive would need to write a thing. The stories that  our ancestors left us are perfectly fine and "sufficient."

Yoiu do not draw, paint, write or think because no one else can. You create because no one else--and no THING else--can draw, paint, write, and think as you. You are a unique soul, and no one else but you can express and share your inner world EXCEPT YOU.

That doesn't change because there are eight billion people in the world who are just as important and precious and creative as you.

It doesn't change if we meet an alien race with eight TRILLION artistic geniuses. 

It doesn't change if robots achieve sentience and start thinking for yourself.

Creativity isn't a zero sum game. It isn't a pizza you divide between yourself, everyone else and some robots and aliens. It's much more magical than that....

Creativity is like love. The more you receive  the more you give back and the more you give, the more you receive. The more beauty there is in the universe, the more beauty it calls from deep within you.

Don't fear the future. Don't fear "competition." Don't fear other people. Don't fear there isn't a place for you to contribute your own vision.

When I saw that AI generated art, my first thought was, "Ugh, how ugly, it looks like the prince has a chicken leg."

And then I thought, "What if, once upon a time, there was a prince with a chicken leg..."

Creativity begets creativity.

Let's bring it back to essays. Kay herself understands the value of this humble genre:

...essays matter because they teach you to perceive nuances in the quality of your own writing, because they teach you to structure and rationalize your thoughts, because you learn about and think more deeply about a text when you write about it, and because a text can teach you important lessons about being a person in this world.

You were born with a brain. Your obligation to use it isn't going to go away, no matter what tools are invented. Your responsibility is now no only to understand how to write an essay, but how to write an essay in a world where AIs can also generate essays.

Is this supposed to be LESS of a challenge? No, it's a GREATER challenge. And the greater the challenge, the more creativity and willpower needed to face it. You can't be lazy, or helpless or slough off. You are the protagonist of your own story and no AI is going to change that.

If you want to know how AI can work for you instead of against you, check out my book, AI for Authors.