With the recent popularity of AI art generators and other types of automatic media makers, you may be wondering if the words you write will ever compete, or worse, be replaced by machine learning? The good news is no, probably not (yet). To understand why, you need to know how AI generators work. Once you give an AI generator something to go on, or an input, it samples a large data set from the internet. In the case of AI art generators, the generator scours paintings, photographs, and the like to generate a new conglomerate image. These works are protected under intellectual property and copyrighted. In other words, AI steals from artists. Copyright laws have yet to catch up with AI. There are dozens of AI softwares out there that will write blog posts, ads, and essays for you. Maybe you’ve even chatted with ChatGPT before, an AI Chatbot, and asked it to tell you a joke or “write a biblical verse in the style of the king james bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.” You might think this is fine because it’s all in good fun or improves productivity or gets you a good grade—but it isn’t. There are two attitudes towards AI generating written content. One side, the side I’m calling corporate, values and praises the speed of AI to write blog articles, social media posts, and ads for their products and brands. Because of the increasing demand for content, corporate relies on AI software to get the job done. The other side belongs to the creatives who rage against the machine. The creatives fear being out-written and replaced by AI that can write 24/7. And with good reason. My stomach dropped when I discovered the AI softwares that claim to write entire novels. Reading an AI-generated book defeats the point of reading, which is to ingest something new, discover inventive prose, be inspired, etc. Using AI software in this way actively harms the future of all creatives. I’m all for technology, for using AI to correct our grammar or generate character names, but when it threatens our creative passions and livelihoods (for the lucky few of us who get to make this their career), I’m firmly against it. In addition to the stealing in some cases and undermining creatives in another, AI also cannot compete with what humans bring to the page. What it produces is often clunky, robotic, and unempathetic. Sure, it may sound fine, but it reads as artificial—usually. AI cannot be original, only reproduce and combine elements it has already experienced. Have you ever read an article about a famous actor or singer and thought, something seems off here? It was likely AI generated with the Internet as its data set, and we know how misinformed the internet can be . . . What’s worse is when we can’t tell the AI generated content from the human one. The secret truth is: AI gets better every time we use it, or feed it new data to improve itself. We are part of the problem. When we willingly participate in dialogues with AI generators, we make them smarter. When we consume content to the point where businesses use AI to keep up, we are part of the problem. What can you do? Don’t participate in AI-generated content, whenever possible. Don’t ask for fanart or book covers or yourself as a Raphael painting, and hire an artist instead. Fiverr, Etsy, and Upwork are good places to start. And please, don’t use AI to write a book. If you don’t have any ideas, there are tons of resources that can help. Reedsy, WritersWrite, TYWI, and JUVEN Press are good places to start. Grayson Yountis a writer based in North Carolina. She attends writing classes of all kinds at UNC Chapel Hill and has a particular fondness for sharp imagery. In her free time, she drafts her own novels.
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May 2023
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