Generative A.I.

or; How ChatGPT May or May Not Replace Me

I want to give you my thoughts on generative AI (ChatGPT, DALL-E, and so on). I know it's been around the news a lot these past few months and you might be tired of reading about it (or maybe you can't get enough of it) but here are my two cents.

Right off the bat, I have noticed that the emerging tech is pretty polarizing. Some people seem to be angry and scared that such a disrupting tech exists, while others are thrilled and want to embrace it. On one side, many see an infringement on copyrights, the death of arts, AI stealing our jobs and a world of deepfakes, while on the other side, some see new ways to be creative (apparently, everyone is an artist now) and see generative AI as a tool that can help them do their work better or opens up opportunities that weren't there in the past, not to mention potential advances in science.

Let me give you an example of what generative AI can do for you. If I want to self-publish a book, I can use DALL-E or Midjourney to generate an amazing cover page like this one:

This is an actual book published by Tor who apparently weren’t aware it was A.I. generated!

and do everything by myself (GOOD!). Would graphic designers / illustrators be happy about that? I'm guessing not. (BAD!)

Where do I fall on this spectrum? Well, somewhere in the middle to be honest. When I speak with friends on the “Embrace and Conquer” side, I feel like a romantic dinosaur who wants to go back to quills, and when I talk to those who want nothing to do with this Evil Tech, I feel like a Silicon Valley stooge.

First, I’ll tell you what I hate about generative AI. The thing about writing is… I don't do it for the results. It took me a long time to figure that out, but it's true. Of course it'd be nice to get noticed by an agent, get on the New York Times bestselling list, win a Hugo, but at the end of the day, that's not why I do it, or else I'd have stopped a long time ago. And it's the same reason why when I look at ChatGPT, and seeing how it could definitely help me speed up the character creation, world building, and even the actual writing of the novel, I go: Meh, no thanks. 

Am I crazy?

I could literally turn out a book every two months with that thing! Surely one of them would sell right? But again, I don't see the point. Art, for me anyway, isn't about the final product. It's all about the process. And generative AI acts as a shortcut to all of that. When a writer writes, a painter paints, a musician composes, a sculptor sculpts, they establish a direct connection to their subconscious (another word we could use is Muse) and when that happens, it's visceral. I'm actually sad for people who have never experienced that feeling, which can come close to ecstasy. When an idea that has been growing inside of me for months or years surfaces and it becomes my purpose to do something with it, I probably look something like this:

So why the fuck would I want to co-write a shallow book in a few weeks if it means losing that?

There, that's the romantic in me I guess.

Of course, I DO believe there are and will be some incredible uses for that tech. For example, having beta readers is necessary and I wouldn't trade KS and CK and MC for anything, but another opinion is sometimes useful. I actually tried it for a short story of mine, asking ChatGPT not to write or edit the text, but to give me it’s opinion. Not only was it super encouraging, it had great analytic vision as well. If I push that even further, the bot, as it keeps improving, could definitely become a stellar book coach, which is something I've been wanting to get for a long time, but… with what money?! 

In the future, it could also help with the design and implementation of a marketing campaign, code my website, and do all the business side of the job that I don't enjoy as much (let's be frank: not at all).

The Industry
 

What will happen to the publishing industry? Already, pro magazines and agents are flooded with short story submissions and queries from non-writers who use ChatGPT to draft a story from A to Z.

I can only surmise this will get worse. 

In fact, this will be true for all forms of art: music, painting, even movies and shows in a few years, why not? Will it be the last proverbial straw that will break the traditional Gatekeepers’s backs? Perhaps. But then, what will we do with this deluge of garbage? Because let’s face it, most of it will be complete crap.

Without agents and editors (BTW, I believe they’ll still exist but their % of the pie will likely diminish even further), the trick will be finding good stuff (AI or human or hybrid). Which is why,  as my friend Liberty keeps saying, the future lies in the hands of a good curator. 

How do you discover a good band or not some book when tens of millions (more?) are uploaded every year? Of course we'll need human curators, but we will also need AI algorithms to do a first triage for us. Does that mean AI will decide what's good for us ON TOP of actually creating it too? 

Thing is, I'm pretty confident humans will still write, and some of them will even thrive. Take chess for example. 27 years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, is chess dead?  Are we watching AI play against itself? No. Chess is actually thriving and living through a real revival at the moment, brought forward by the pandemic and because of star content creators like Gothamchess, the Botez Sisters, GM Hikary Nakamura  and Chessbrahs, just to name a few. People for whom chess was a passion and who can now make a living out of it through Twitch and YouTube. 

My deeper belief is that humans are adaptive, and while disruptive tech always have a BIG DARK SIDE (think social media), many people have found creative ways on how to use it and make a career out of it. Chances are, the same will be true for AI.

(Please don't think this is 100% unicorn and rainbows conclusion. Because, there WILL be a BIG DARK SIDE to AI too.)