What’s the Point of a Novel in the Age of AI?

It’s easy to get discouraged when generative AI can churn out a book with nothing but a few sentences and enough electricity to power a small town. I believe authors may feel some short-term pain from genAI and its ilk, but as always, there are more reasons to persist than to give up.

TLDR; keep writing and reading, because that’s what human brains are meant to do, and the threats on human attention spans and the livelihoods of writers may not go away, but they will change in unpredictable ways that will eventually lead to human benefit.

Books are records of our lives, in one way or another.

An analogy: I’ve recently taken up photography, and it sometimes seems pointless when I can generate any image I want in seconds. But I’ve realized that’s not the point; the point of a photograph is to document a moment of my life, nobody else’s, and first and foremost to solidify that memory in my own mind. Generating an artificial version of that memory is pointless, as I won’t have that experience to connect to the image. Writing is the same; all books, in one way or another, are records of our lives, or at least of our particular tastes at that moment when we wrote them. Artificially generating that sort of thing defeats the purpose, as there’s no benefit to the author or reader; there’s no human connection through shared experiences, tastes, or other parts of life.

The ability to sustain attention on a book, as a reader or writer, is already a rare skill and may become even more uncommon

This may be the MBA in me talking, but it’s useful to have a skill that nobody else has. The MBA’s call that differentiation. If we think forward a few years, there are already trends to suggest that the simple ability to write (or read) an entire book will become a lost art. It’s already happening in schools in the US. And the reason for hope, to me, is that reading and writing aren’t simply old technologies that will disappear, as technologies of the past have done. They are essential for human thought as we know it. So the few humans who retain those skills will suddenly be specialists, and although it’s impossible to predict what course AI will take, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine there will be a need for reading, writing, thinking humans at some point in the future. And those of us who can still perform those heroic acts will be first in line for whatever human reading, writing, and thinking that needs to be done.

Technology can’t overwrite evolution, at least not in 20 years

This is coming from a non-expert, but hear me out. Human language has been around for over 100,000 years. That’s nothing on an evolutionary timescale, but it’s long enough to cause our brains to evolve into more complex arrangements. Say what you will about AI’s potential, but there’s nothing it can do to de-evolve our brains in the, say, 20 years it’s been around. Sure, individuals can and will be harmed by the presence of all-knowing assistants to do their thinking for them, and that’s horrible. But if we zoom out to the human species level, AI will need to persist, in some consistent manner, for a lot longer to cause our species to actually change as a result. The conclusion, to me, is that humans, who evolved to benefit from the use of language to structure and guide our thoughts and communication with one another, will always need that ability to thrive. Language, and by extension reading and writing, by definition can’t become outdated technologies as long as we’re still human.

Just because writing will become less profitable doesn’t mean it’s less important

Writing hasn’t really ever been a ticket to the upper class, but with AI replacing the lower tier writing jobs left and right, it seems the profit to be made in this profession is disappearing every day. I don’t have any hopeful words about that, to be honest. AI exists, as all new technologies do, to make somebody a shit ton of money. That money has to come from somewhere. And it’s a hard truth that a lot of the money, including in the indirect form of intellectual property rights violations, comes from writers. I hope it passes, but I don’t know if it will in an unrestrained capitalistic environment like the one we have in the western world at the moment.

However, as I wrote above, the importance of writing is not always financial. Yes, it’s a reality that the need for money restricts the ability of even the most prolific writers to practice their craft full time, and that’s a complete shame. But keep honing those skills and using them as best you can, because it’s what humans need to do.

Hone your writing skills, write your stories and books, and think of the time spent maintaining your craft as an investment in a future where generative AI has been redirected to do something actually useful for society. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll have bigger problems anyway. But I believe our humanity will eventually lead us to realize that AI is a tool that should benefit humanity, rather than be put to the questionable uses generative AI serves today. Just because it’s developed by people without moral compasses doesn’t mean we all have to reorient our own compasses to match.

Cheers,

Perrin