The AI-future No One is Talking About

Optimistic reflections from a fiction writer

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I’m not an AI bro. I don’t condone the use of AI to generate anything, be it an article, a short story, or an artwork. Besides from the oft-mooted point that these are taken from creators who did not give consent for their copyrighted works to be used, I think it misses the bigger picture. It’s lazy, it’s unsatisfying, and the output just plain sucks (kinda).

I’m not here to go over the arguments for or against, though. That’s been done and continues to be done to death. I’m here to talk about what I imagine is going to happen in ten years or so if the current trends continue, and to take a more optimistic stance (Lord knows, we could use one, right?).

‘A machine, however ingenious, is incapable of original thought.’ — From Roald Dahl’s fantastic AI-centric story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator, (way ahead of its time!)

Attention is being broken

There are two things that make me take an optimistic view for us writers. The first is the oft-cited point about humans having a worse attention span than a goldfish. This stat has been thoroughly debunked, but the truth is not far off.

• 47% say that “deep thinking” has become a thing of the past — (the Policy Institute…