Outsourcing Our Brains
Only Unhinged Prose Can Outsmart AI
A part-time side hustle I briefly considered, but didn’t get scammed into, was training an AI storyteller. For supposedly $50 an hour, the job description included tasks like creating original prompts and responses to an AI model, writing responses backed up with reasoning and logic, and ranking responses along a rubric. The scoring criteria included providing a number from 1–5 on the responses to concepts like ‘harmfulness’ and ‘truthfulness’.
The ease of technology seems to demoralize the act of writing. The speed of information, the spread of mis- and disinformation, and the condensation of complex topics to overly simplistic bullet points seem to give additional challenges to the mountain that is Writing. Freelance writing jobs are all but extinct thanks to the ease of AI to produce high-volume and low-quality content. Why bother continuing one of the earliest forms of human expression if we can now outsource our brains for free?
The first book written by AI prompts, , is a sci-fi murder mystery that investigates the death of the main character’s favorite author. Admittedly, I haven’t read it but the excerpts I read seem as though the authors prompted AI to make a badly formed rip off of the iconic character of Philip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler with the story structure of a Dan Brown first draft.
One of the co-authors of the book, with the apt nom de plume of Aiden Marchine, wrote:
“Originality died well before the arrival of AI; we are currently in the most derivative period of human creativity since the Industrial Revolution.”
ChatGPT is the Temu of Literature
There are very valid reasons to get upset about the machine takeover of creative writing. Will AI get good enough to go from lite-read to literature? Anything can be mimicked and recreated by a machine these days if books are uploaded to the internet for the algorithms to sort and steal by style and prose.
If ChatGPT is the Temu of Literature, will the only writing that can potentially outsmart AI be rambling prose that doesn’t make any sense? There are certain books with nonsensical neverending prose that scream at logic and structure to fuck off. Thick blocks of frustration like Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Naked Lunch, and Infinite Jest seem to be the Iron Man literary hurdles for nerds. Perhaps those works represent the future of literature. Outsmart the algorithm, confuse the reader.
To compare, the first line of Naked Lunch is:
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train…”
AI Can’t be Taught to Fuck Up
From cirrhosis to psychosis, the highs and lows of the human experience that shaped the prose of many writers can’t yet seem to be copied by an AI-generated tool. The people who prompted AI to draft Death of an Author managed to insert a level of self-involvement to the algorithm since the main character finds himself involved in a plot at an AI-language company. However, AI can’t be taught to write 250 pages while completely wasted or ramble about topics that would qualify a book for censorship at a public library.
There is a limit to algorithm and formula for AI that does not allow the tool to replace the diversity of the human experience. The one dimensional aspect of AI as a tool to better organize the structure of an idea or to provide a guideline for a process seems to allow AI to better serve as a 21st century muse or sidekick, providing quick scripts to guide the writing journey rather than the main brain of content.
Industrial Protectionism for Human Writers?
The for the use of generative AI extends beyond the first victory of writers unions in Hollywood to protect real people from being replaced or the risk of low-cost AI models to drive lower wages for human workers.
The AI policy landscape is full of landmines on the questions of data protection, regulation, and ethics. One fascinating aspect of AI is the unintentional violation of human rights through the amplification of fake news and the undetected bias of undemocratic narratives.
AI is moving up in the world, with introduced by the Biden Administration in 2022 that outline policy guidelines for mitigating civil rights violations like algorithm discrimination and promoting democratic values.
The potential for AI can be summed up with another quote from the Death of an Author compiler:
Generals are always fighting the last war, and tech prophets are always predicting the last disruption. In the shadow of the catastrophe of social media, the fear and contempt that AI writing has inspired are reflex responses to what this technology represents: the birth of a new art form. I get it. AI is alien, and its art feels alien. That alien has come from a universe of beauty.’
And no, I did not use AI to write this.
