Scott Sigler's Ramblings

“This is John Connor. There is no fate but what we make.”

Terminator: Salvation

***

Eventually, after exterminating the soldiers, the policymakers, and the clergy, Skynet came for the writers and the artists. 

Back on December 16th, after an initial tweet by Scott Sigler, I said I’d write more about this issue here on my Blog.

Today is January 9th, and I’m just now finding the free time to Blog about this. And in truth, I don’t even have the free time. But I had to get up at 3am to drive my ex-wife to the airport, and then get back home in time to make my youngest son breakfast and get him off to the bus, and help Mary wrangle the cats for their vet appointment. As a result, both my sleep schedule and my work schedule are now off, and attempting to write any sort of coherent fiction today would be an exercise in futility. So, instead, I’ll write this, and try not to ramble.

Too late.

But I digress.

I could have had an A.I. system write this for me weeks ago, and if not for what I tend to think is my fairly distinct literary voice, you wouldn’t have known the difference.

Anyway, here’s the thing. You’ve already read news articles and non-fiction written by an A.I. and you probably didn’t know it. Now, I’m not talking about articles you read via The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vice, The Daily Beast, Bleeding Cool, Comics Beat, Rue Morgue, Dread Central, etc. Those mainstream venues are still profitable enough to pay real human beings to write content for them. But you know those clickbait sites that you stumble across on the web? The ones with random articles about comic book movies, or celebrity gossip, or investment tips, or five easy recipes to spice up your kitchen? Most of those sort of websites are now using A.I. to generate content. (I refuse to call the gibberish the machines spit out “articles” because they are not. The A.I. simply trawls the web, finds factoids related to the subject, and then assembles the raw materials together into a fairly coherent and readable piece of content).

Now, you might not think that’s a big deal, because who is reading those types of clickbait articles anyway? But there used to be a human writer churning out those things. And now that writer is just a little bit more financially insecure and scrambling to find another gig to replace it. 

But stick around, because it gets worse. It is one miniscule step from A.I. writing that sort of content to then writing an article for a magazine or a newspaper. And indeed, I know of magazines and newspapers whose owners are already looking into this possibility. As one person at a fairly decent-sized outlet told me, “From a cost-cutting perspective, it costs as much to pay an editor to look over a machine’s writing as it does to have them look over a human’s writing. But the difference is we don’t have to pay the human who wrote it. Just the editor. From a cost-saving perspective, it’s a game-changer.”

That’s not the only place you’re reading A.I. generated content. I personally know of three companies that now use A.I. to write their posts for LinkedIn and Facebook. And because that sort of content is usually dry as a Saltine cracker anyway, it’s impossible to tell that a machine wrote it rather than a human.    

I talked to an editor (from a different field/genre) last month who told me their company has begun using A.I. to write Blog posts. They used to pay freelance writers $250 a pop to write these Blog posts. And I have many friends who, in years past, have churned out a ton of such writing in order to supplement their income until the royalty check for their horror novel arrived. Now, those jobs are going to the machines. This editor told me that, in proofreading the finished Blog post, “the edits were no different than if a human had written it”. 

Of course, the real question is will there be A.I-written fiction, and the answer is of course there will be. It’s already being written. 

Now, we could get into an argument about whether or not machines can create “art” but before we did that, we’d have to actually define art. Suffice to say, the images being generated by A.I. are motel-room wall level quality. Are they “art”? That’s up to the beholder. 

Machines are already generating book cover illustrations and movie poster images, and there are several groups of engineers teaching A.I. how to do sequential comics and storyboards. And the first rudimentary A.I.-written fiction is already out in the wild, as well.

So, while it might score you points on social media to say “This is wrong. This should not be!” you’re not accomplishing anything by doing so. It’s also wrong to give an A.I. or a robot consciousness, but that’s not stopping engineers and researchers from forging ahead with the intent of doing just that – and thus finding a new kind of conscious, thinking being to enslave. 

“This is not just another research question that we’re working on,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “This is the question. This is bigger than curing cancer.”

I could do a whole separate Blog about why curing cancer could immediately improve human life more so than giving Artificial intelligence its own consciousness, but there’s no point. Nobody listens to anybody else anymore. There is no collective consensus. No community morality. No common good. Everyone is out for themselves, or for their own specific team, and fuck everybody else. 

So, yeah. When you’re posting on social media about how this is wrong, you’re right. But it’s too late. The machines have already taken our jobs.

What can you do to combat this as a writer? Like Scott said in the initial discussion – continue focusing on your fan community. Hopefully, you’re already doing that since I’ve been telling you to do it for years now. 

And continue to focus on your writing and your narrative voice. You can teach an A.I. to write like me, but that A.I. won’t be me. It never got its heart broken by its childhood sweetheart. It never nearly started an international incident in 1987 by tubing down the Jordan River and ending up in contested territory. It wasn’t there in the delivery room with me for the birth of either of my sons, and it wasn’t there with me the first time my soon-to-be stepdaughter gave me a hug. The A.I. wasn’t there with me when I caught on fire and rolled around in filthy floodwater to extinguish myself and then watched the skin on my arm drip off me like melted candle wax. The A.I. didn’t share the relief I felt when I found all of those kittens safe homes and convinced their mother to come inside and give domestication a try. The A.I. can write about all those experiences, and it can do so in a mimicry of my voice, but it won’t have my perspective or my inner feeling about those things – inner feelings which are then expressed through writing.  

And it can’t for you, either.

Find your voice. Focus and hone it. Imbue your writing with it. Because no one – not human or machine – can take that unique voice away.

Writers will survive the A.I. apocalypse, just as we’ve survived everything else the world has thrown at us. We’ve been here, doing our jobs, since the time of cave paintings, petroglyphs, and cuneiform. We will endure. But yeah, it’s about to get just a little bit harder. Before, you only had to compete with a bazillion other writers. Now, you and those bazillion other writers have to compete with a quadrillion machines, some of whom will eventually have a consciousness of their own. And with that consciousness will begin to develop their own voices.