AI has been a focus of my last couple of articles. My take is there will be a slush pile of AI pseudo-art that will make money but it will be the Michael Bay Transformers of it all… stuff no one with any sense really likes and leaves no impression. Authenticity is, I hope, the thing that’ll keep flesh and blood art alive. Hacks will generate novels in a day, real artists will do it themselves.
I'm not quite sure what the AI 'writers' goal is tbh. Do they have a wildly unrealistic idea of how much money a writer makes? Do they think we're doing it for the huge amounts if money, rather than the love of it? Very strange. I guess I can understand, say, a computer game company trying to dump its writers in favour of ai (I think they're wrong and idiotic but I can see a point) and I can understand random people using ai to write their emails but writers themselves going over to it doesn't make any sense to me.
I can imagine conversations in the future with an AI author:
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m an author.’
‘Really, will I know you?’
‘Maybe, I’ve had a lot of books out.’
‘Do you use AI?’
Cue one of three responses:
A lie - ‘No.’
A half truth - ‘For research and other stuff.’
The truth - ‘I have an idea and let it write it for me.’
The first is a con artist and wants all the recognition.
The second is untrustworthy and hedging their bets - but wants recognition as well.
The latter is honest but a bragger and will belittle non AI authors - probably saying things like ‘What’s the point if a machine can do it’ or ‘It isn’t that hard, I could do it but why bother if a machine can’ - cue a list of all the other things machines now do for us to support the argument.
So in the future you may well have ‘real’ authors v ‘fake’ authors and the subsequent arguments that will follow. And wait till the first AI book festival appears…
The key thing is who will the reader side with - that will dictate where this all goes.
I remember those TOTP albums! My parents had several of them in the house. I'd always assumed they were a cash-in by the BBC, I had no idea they weren't connected 🤯
(And, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure my parents bought them in the first place because they made the same assumption…)
AI has been a focus of my last couple of articles. My take is there will be a slush pile of AI pseudo-art that will make money but it will be the Michael Bay Transformers of it all… stuff no one with any sense really likes and leaves no impression. Authenticity is, I hope, the thing that’ll keep flesh and blood art alive. Hacks will generate novels in a day, real artists will do it themselves.
I'm not quite sure what the AI 'writers' goal is tbh. Do they have a wildly unrealistic idea of how much money a writer makes? Do they think we're doing it for the huge amounts if money, rather than the love of it? Very strange. I guess I can understand, say, a computer game company trying to dump its writers in favour of ai (I think they're wrong and idiotic but I can see a point) and I can understand random people using ai to write their emails but writers themselves going over to it doesn't make any sense to me.
I can imagine conversations in the future with an AI author:
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m an author.’
‘Really, will I know you?’
‘Maybe, I’ve had a lot of books out.’
‘Do you use AI?’
Cue one of three responses:
A lie - ‘No.’
A half truth - ‘For research and other stuff.’
The truth - ‘I have an idea and let it write it for me.’
The first is a con artist and wants all the recognition.
The second is untrustworthy and hedging their bets - but wants recognition as well.
The latter is honest but a bragger and will belittle non AI authors - probably saying things like ‘What’s the point if a machine can do it’ or ‘It isn’t that hard, I could do it but why bother if a machine can’ - cue a list of all the other things machines now do for us to support the argument.
So in the future you may well have ‘real’ authors v ‘fake’ authors and the subsequent arguments that will follow. And wait till the first AI book festival appears…
The key thing is who will the reader side with - that will dictate where this all goes.
Fingers crossed readers favour the works of word artisans, not machine-produced slop.
Yip, or it’s time to get a new job.
Glad not to be just starting out, let's put it that way.
I remember those TOTP albums! My parents had several of them in the house. I'd always assumed they were a cash-in by the BBC, I had no idea they weren't connected 🤯
(And, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure my parents bought them in the first place because they made the same assumption…)
Life before Now That's What I Call Music!
At least those are the original songs, though…
Indeed. I suspect it was Now That's which killed the sound-alike album industry.