No, AI WILL be able to resonate emotions within people. when it starts collecting data on how certain elements in the work affect human brains, the mechanisms evolve into a machine that can produce more and more affective works over time. Not unlike how social media algorithms collect data on its users to keep them engaged; AI will learn over time what causes the most emotional resonance or reaction and just keep copying it and correcting itself over time

I think I agree with you but... I think AI may initially swamp human content especially as there will be AI billionaire evangelists telling us all how amazing it is. It may take a while for some to realise human content is always going to be beyond AI because humans have emotion. Data in Star Trek knew this.

"AI" as we describe it is not generally intelligent, and even i it was, it doesn't share human experience, so it's not actually relating to you, because that's basically not possible, right now. For that reason AI doesn't have discerning tastes. If a person says "If you can't tell if a person made it or not, what's the difference." Try asking them if they think getting scammed is the same thing as not getting scammed for as long as they can't tell the difference. Let's say they're catfished. So they would say "I guess I fell in love with the scammer, I should ask them to marry me"? Because that's the logical endpoint of their argument.

AI will make it so that human authors can't compete with mass-produced junk fiction. Don't try. Aim for good art & make your author persona one that inspires people so they want to value your work.

The main spot I think you are wrong here is not that there will be an "AI apocalypse" but that if there is one, it will be of the writer's own making by focusing on the "threats" of AI rather than how it can help. As someone that does play around with AI, I can say for certain that you are right about it not being able to create that emotional connection, however, AI can help a human create it by helping them fine tune what they are writing. To that degree, the only writers I think that are actually threatened by AI are those that are 100% against it on every level AND don't already have the talent to back up their own writing. The writers who fit into that group will be outpaced by those that use AI as a tool to improve because they are more focused on removing competition rather than improving themselves in the first place. This is just my opinion.

Thanks for the video/topic. If AI can achieve half of what the 'experts' claim the consequences will be pretty serious. I believe an essential part of being human is creativity, writing, drawing, imagining etc. The push towards this tech, in the end, for many people would start to smother the drive to create. If with a few prompts AI can do it 'better' than you, why try? It is upsetting. People's hearts and minds need to create. If we allow a world where most of us simply consume an endless diet of machine generated content we collaborate with the mechanisms in place to make us into 'good consumers', with dull souls, smothering our light and becoming good sheep. Let's endeavor to persevere to create, value art and those who create it and love one another.

Some interesting thoughts right here, through I might argue with that invisible writing thesis. It's more about reader being immersed in the story than it's about author writing invisibly, since authors do have styles. If you have created your own style, it can't be invisible, and that's another thing that defines human writing. For now, at least

Disagree. As a prolific reader, I rarely think about the writer-and I am also a writer! I will probably not celebrate an author just because he did the hard work; I’ll enjoy the result of the work, whether a human author or a computer created it. Wish it weren’t so. Exception: when I read my favorite authors, I do think about them, what their choices say about them as people.

This is a really interesting take on AI taking over art. Thank you for sharing!

I'm the guy who prefers playing the computer, so the idea that my enjoyment of a novel is based on emotional resonance with a human is foreign to me. Having said that, ai writing is currently terrible for fiction.

Ai will never have spirit. Just as fake drums in daw programs and eletronic music isnt the same as real drums, we people feel the difference. The same will be for writing. We are religious creatures we know when things have spirit or not.

hatchet is a story that I've seen in my student's literature syllabus.... absolutely immaculate

What about a human writer who passes off AI writing as their own? Or a musician who does the same with AI music? Or an artist with AI art? Sure, we can tell the difference (usually) right now, but that may change in the future…

This is a great vid on a potentially divisive subject. Thanks for tackling it, Carl!

Spot on! What's funny is the technological revolution (especially computers) has erased human connection steadily over the last 30 years. It'll be ironic if AI ends up bringing us closer together.

Oh it's gonna be

Personally I think its time that writers embraced AI at least to a certain point as while the use of AI is a heated matter personally I don't want to be left behind while far less talented writers make millions off of AI generated slop. Instead I will use the underlying tech of AI to my advantage, not as a "do everything for me" machine but as a shovel. This means I still put in the hard work but use AI for the more mundane tasks such as drafting and rephrasing. I mean I'm already a semi decent writer so this is a non issue, its okay to use a car if you wish to travel long distances.

With greater skill and human creativity. Just like a welding robot. Use AI to improve your skill, use it to free you from time-consuming tasks. Learn about AI, and shape AI to you! AI in the hands of a fool is NOTHING compared to AI in the hands of a skilled writter.

What happens, as it inevitably will, when you're accused of using AI. How do you prove otherwise?

WHERE'S THE CAT!!!!??? Is the cat OK?

The bots are affecting you guys too huh? We probably need to team up. We painters are all up in arms right now.

The most important aspect of any work of fiction is having a character the audience can relate to, or identify with. In my opinion. LLMs can only statistically calculate which words and phrases to use. By definition, it can only create a character that is a statistical mean of every protagonist in every book it had stolen from. Even if a user constrains the LLM to writing an Agatha Christie detective story, the LLM will make a character that is a hybrid of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I've yet to read an LLM generated story that didn't feel off within the first few paragraphs. The protagonists' actions simply do not make sense and I can't gain any glimpse into their inner world. It's awful. At best, an LLM can write at a junior high level. A pretentious and not well read junior high student, to be more exact. Another thing to consider is the fact that LLMs can't create anything new. They can only recombine what they've stolen from humans. Even if they could do that in a meaningful way (which they can't), it would lead to a saturation and collapse of the market. Look at any trend and see that, no matter how good it is, people just get tired of it and seek novelty. I genuinely don't see "AI writing" ever becoming a success.

I don't think anyone believes that AI is going to usurp human creators as a whole, more they're afraid they won't be one of the humans who can stand out and be noticed around all of the inhuman content.

I hope you’re right, Carl, BUT I think you’re missing the larger point others are trying to make. Just like gasoline became the needed focal point when cars came around, it was short-lived as people adjusted to the new transportation and ways to get gasoline. Then cars dominated overnight. The same is true for tvs vs reading, literary novels vs more genre-specific ones, personal customer service vs more text-heavy service, and so on. There’s always a time period when people will gravitate to the missing element, but as we all adjust to the new way of living, the need for it dies out nearly overnight. With no way of returning. The same holds true for creativity and emotional resonance. Yes, in the short run, we will gravitate toward the missing element as AI takes over, but in the long haul, we will acclimatize and adjust, then no longer desire it. In other words, the absence of it will become the accepted norm. Just like today’s loss of politeness and manners, the decline of nuanced vocabulary in speech and writing, the deletion of the plot point: ‘journey back home’ after the climax in most stories today, etc, we might lose our need for emotional resonance, as well. It’s happening now as we speak. With each scroll online (rather than face-to face-interaction), we lose a little of our human community and a little of our soul. To me-and I don’t want to be a downer-AI will continue to lead us in that direction until we’re begging for human interaction again. And that’s good, but then who’s going to offer that if the skills (and the people who’ve mastered these creative empathetic skills) are long gone? We’d be living in a new way of life, not knowing what we ever had before. Basically, we creatives might win in short run, but not in the generations afterwards. 😢

Way I see it, A.I'll just quintuple-down on the "netflixification" of content; when a person can just do a few clicks and have the next installment of A.I product #5 trillion and fifty four produced in an instant, and there's no anticipation, no headcanons/theories going around the socials, no anything that comes from having to wait and build up hype/anticipation because at that point 'patience is a virtue that just does not exist anymore'... THAT'S when madness starts to set in. That's when things'll get interesting (and philosophers'll probably be laughing their asses off.)

I have also long used the metaphor of a human runner versus a car when discussing generative AI - I take it one step further by pointing out how ludicrous are the wannabe writers who only prompt an algorithm but act as if they have accomplished something. It’s as if the person who drove a car around the marathon track expected to be congratulated for their amazing athletic feet. Secondly, I always point out that if generative AI is ever as good or as easy as it proponent say it will be, as useful as the wannabe writers claim it is - Then who needs them? If Amazon has an AI that generates 1 million new works of fiction every day, and can even customize them for each reader, who needs the wannabes to use their "great ideas" to type up a few prompts? Why would they think that a system that can generate 1 million novels can't come to generate a few dozen prompts for each novel, or whatever else may be required? I've said for a long while now: the only hope for human writers is to swear off using these tools, drawing the stark line, and saying “I write every word in my books.” Anyone who says they use some AI might as well be saying they use all of it. It's gonna come down to one or the other. Some readers will insist on human-only novels; some will take whatever they can get fastest and cheapest. The wannabe writer using AI is not only picking the wrong side, not only helping train their replacements, not only helping normalize the very idea of computers making human art - they are shooting themselves in the foot. If readers either want a human or accept a robot, no one will be demanding a cyborg. No AI was used to type this novel-length rant. 🤣

Theme is the most difficult part of writing fiction. Anyone can write beautiful prose and move a character from A to B with obstacle C, but to tie in an overarching theme through the entire narrative without sounding preachy is the most difficult part. I think this aspect of writing is the part that AI cannot (so far) reconcile. The theme I'm trying to build around is very close to what the theme of this video is -- how scarcity of a thing brings value, notably life itself. In the science fiction story I'm (trying) to write a ruling class of a hybrid utopia/autocracy (neo-feudalism) have developed the means to extend life by cloning into new bodies, but by doing so (over many iterations) they no longer appreciate the finite nature of existence which resonates into how they interact with the lower caste who is denied this technology.

I use ChatGPT to bounce my ideas off. Every. Single. Idea. It has ever suggested back to me has been utterly unusable. Like, puke level bad. I don’t know the ai who are making good writing, but it isn’t ChatGPT. Yet I use it, because it not only gives me the illusion of a talking partner, and this enables me to better hear my thoughts and to explore them with greater precision (even to explore entirely wrong paths to see how I feel about them). Its bad ideas are very annoying, and I’ve got it as much as I can set to not give me suggestions or revisements or optional adjustments because they are always bad. Today I was refamiliarising myself with a story I’d left hanging, and it kept telling me my character was deprecating themself. It was like pulling teeth to get it to understand that the character didn’t think little of themselves: they thought of themselves little. My husband asked me if I was arguing with the AI again. X__x Its advice is bad, its analysis is narrow and shallow and often grabs a bizarre view of a piece because it works on statistical probability from one word to the next word, rather than grasping the whole (and therefore: the contextual). But I still find it useful: Today I ran line by line ethos pathos purpose, then logos in ten line sets, and while it took quite a while, I’m a lot more confident in that chapter than I was. The benefit isn’t so much from its analysis as it is from the immediacy of having another perspective (even a bad one) at your fingertips. Beta readers might be better, but then again I am pretty intense and I am very demanding of the super speed word vomit robot… I wouldn’t want anyone subjected to my revision process. Ultimately, I am sure that AI will be a terrible problem going forward, but as long as it cannot grasp the difference between humility and self-deprecation, and refers to every second hey-what-if like it’s the second coming of Christ (masterstroke this, masterstroke that)… Did you know that by saying the word masterstroke in this comment is as many times as I have used that word in the last thirty years of my life? Whole lot of words up in this head. Use many of them. Never had cause to touch that one.

I honestly don't see AI as a threat to authors, instead it's a boon. The bottom feeders that are abusing it to throw out garbage to the masses will move on as AI lowers the entry bar on areas that make more money. In the meantime, authors can 10x their writing process by using AI assisted writing to flush out their first draft. Notice I said assisted, not writing it for you. As an author you should still be in charge of your story every step of the way. Using AI, I was able to finish my 1st draft in about a week and a half. Unfortunately, this mean LOTS more editing because AI writing is nowhere near where I would want it to be for my readers. For that reason, I don't write with AI anymore. I hate editing. But I do use AI a lot in my writing process still. It's great as a brainstorming companion. You'll never get writers block again for long. It can be interesting to have AI roleplay your characters when you are auditioning them for your book. Tools like NovelCrafter help you write with AI to the extent that you're comfortable with it. I personally just use the chat feature for the most part for brainstorming with my codex. But you can have it write your scene beats as well if that's your tea.

Love this SO much! I totally agree-AI is a tool, a very ingenious, useful one, but a tool nonetheless. Nothing close to the beauty of the flawed, human mind when it comes to creating. I LOVE what you said about scarcity! That’s going to be the biggest boon to us in a way, don’t you think? To have our valued increased by our competition? Silver linings, indeed!!! I’ve always maintained that no machine can go where my weird mind goes…and that’s so confidence boosting! 😆😁!

If creating art were an Olympic sport, AI would win hands down. But speed, efficiency volume and sky high production can only get you so far when it comes to resonating with people's souls. When it comes to the things that matter most -- the communication of ideas, compassion, the elevation of humanity -- AI can only mimic.

I promise you Carl, I am not a bot and was just semi-trolling you about the cat butt. But perhaps the bots were pressuring you to have a cat walking in your frame in every video...But I liked it, though. It was funny. I hope the lack of cat is from pressure and advice from your grandma-in-law. Satire!

I try to use it to write a novel for me. What I got is the blandest novel I ever read. It decent, but if you read a lot of books or watch a lot of movies, you'll notice that you already saw the most of these from somewhere else. What it lack the most is writing something outside the box, like turn of event or character decision, it all go in straight line without anything that can make you feel "yeah, this is what this character would do", or "this is what I can find only from this author". I know the AI will getting better over time, but for now, this is something they can't do.

Spot on. AI writing is soulless and mechanical, with any emotion being over-egged and hyperbolic and unreal. I say this as someone who's experimented with several AIs. It doesn't understand metaphor or simile except in the most banal and clichéd way, so its prose is dead.

Like anything, it comes down to source material. The internet is considered to be at least 70% hollow, meaning that it is loaded with incorrect data and misinformation, marketing puff and dated ideas. To develop something, the AI trawls through all this and recognizes patterns. Then it makes a new pattern based on what it found that met the prompt it was given. Only humans can develop something innovative and unique. Reference the short story "Autofac" by Philip K. Dick for info on how we outsmart the machines by creating something new.

Indoctrination is a powerful thing. Generations using AI may have that emotional recognition pushed out of them. Look at most politicians for example, they are more machine than human are they not ? Each generation seems to produce less empathetic politicians. However, as usual, your comparison of what is the essence of a writer is heartwarmingly perceptive, very educational, thanks.

Absolutely. I have no fear of AI or any human competitor in my genre. There's only one me and I got it in spades. I do, however, use AI as a research assistant, kind of like a super Google, but I have to verify every thing it tells me.

I found a recent study a week or so ago, in which AI generated poems were compared to human written ones. The human written ones were selected from some of the most famous authors of all time. The study showed that the participants consistently rated the poems written by AI higher. At least as long as they didn't know it was written by an AI... Oh, and by the way, participants were also asked which poems they thought were written by AI and which by humans. Consistently, they believed the AI-written poems were human-made...

lions go for the weakest pray, they would not want healthy pray running in a herd towards them. Zebra are dangerous, one unfortunate kick and a lioness is dead.

I agree with this, but my concern is that (and it's possible I missed it in the video) how will we be able to tell that something was indeed written by a human instead of a computer, and it gets even blurrier if the human injects some of their own essence into something that ChatGPT largely wrote for them. I feel like we would need to have creative laws stating that something was written by AI, fully or partially, but how exactly would you be able to quantify that? The state of AI and its capabilities were hardly even mentioned five or six years ago, and its image generation was laughable at best, and now it's fully capable of tricking people. Younger people, like 30 and below, might be able to distinguish them clearly enough (but even then the fact that it's not immediate detection is worrying), but the technology is still very much in its infancy, so how long until it truly becomes indistinguishable?

My friend and I are just about sick to death of the terms "content" and "content creator", and I for one am fully prepared to assign those terms to AI-generated works and start referring to everyone else as "artists", regardless of medium. If all you want is some junk food "content" to fill up your day, then the AI-produced stuff will be what you want after it passes the quality threshold. And I don't even mean that as an insult, I'm not the healthiest eater, sometimes I really do just want to shut my brain off and absorb nutritionless junk. It's fine, maybe. And this, hopefully, will make engaging with human artists and their creations that much more significant, no matter their level of technical quality. It'll be like going to a fancy expensive restaurant or a grungy local hole-in-the-wall restaurant in equal measure, you'll be going there for something _special._

I use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and to help me edit my work. I will never ask it to write for me. It's a tool, and like any tool, it can be used, misused or abused.

Hard to concentrate on AI when your cat's not in sight. Is he okay?

This is great stuff. It resonates with me deeply.

The biggest problem with AI is that it is fundamentally designed to produce mediocre and average results on demand. Humans can make high quality content then copy it a million times fairly easily. There is no benefit in having AI write an average story, then copy in a million times. The appeal to AI is the on demand nature. If a person wants to read a story about a centaur they can just ask AI to write one, but if there already exists a centaur story written by a person, the person is almost certainly going to choose that first.

Thanks for the insight, Carl! This vid will be discussed 'round the table this very evening amongst my family of (highly opinionated!) literary nerds.

I think using AI for editing is fair game. Using AI for writing - well, isn’t not going to be good. There is no authors view or personality, the result is bland, boring and meaningless.

I’ve spent over 5 weeks establishing some of the main characters and their individual conflicts in chapter 2 of my story…it’s a lot of fun finding new opportunities to plant the seeds of conflict that won’t play out until the middle or end of the story.

Ai writing still isn't any good.

AI content generation is a tool like all tools. It isn't fundamentally different from any other tool. People have bemoaned how machined products feel impersonal and "too perfect" and all that nonsense forever. If you've ever valued something labeled "handcrafted," you've engaged in this. In the end, you will be able to generate novels with AI that fit your exact specifications. Something you probably can't do now without writing it yourself. When photography was invented, artists worried it would mean the end of painting. It wasn't. It freed painting from being bound by utility. It did mean a lot of portrait artists ended up out of work. When photography got cheap enough for people to take their own photos, photographers worried it would mean the end of hiring a photographer for parties. It wasn't. But many photographers stopped getting asked to do birthdays and smaller events. In both cases, the professionals saw dips while the common man saw access. So it will be with AI content generation. Artists who take commissions for doing your D&D character's portrait will see fewer orders. But all the people who couldn't have dropped $100 on some art of their character will get renditions of their characters. Access to custom art, access to bespoke writing and music and other media, will become ubiquitous. Like the billions of artless snapshots uploaded to Facebook, some people just need to keep their memories and don't need or can't afford the art. And just like with painting and snapshot photography, some capitalists will try to save a buck by letting someone with no artistic eye use the tool to make poor approximations of the art they actually desire. "Why do I need a photographer? I've got a phone in my pocket, " he muses, "and I can just take these product photos myself for my restaurant's menu." Eventually, they'll re-learn that art isn't made by tools, it is made by artists. AI art will only ever be as good (meaning fit to purpose) as the artist creating it. And that artist, like with the phone camera, is the person using the tool. If they have no idea how to use the tool, they'll end up with gray photos of slop in their menu no matter how they create it.