SO WHAT IS NEXT? ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE WRITER

BUILD-OUT OF YOUR COMPETITOR

At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, Jenifer Eagan was asked about AI and what it meant to “writers,” as persons, as a collective, as a profession. Her response was largely, “Look, we’ve faced these upheavals before, and the book world has been knocked on its head, and the answer is always the same. As writers, we have to get better.”

OUR upheaval is AI. I like talking about the large language machines as Probability Engines = PE, and I think that classification has direct impact on what I will write in the next paragraphs. PEs are and will predict you, and they’ll get more “you”-like as they go.

You’re reading this now in a world filling with PE text, even if you’re not noticing. Suspicion: a Facebook, SubStack, or X article comes scrolling by:

“The community hates my reclusive dad because all these dogs come and go, but they don’t know he’s raising companion dogs for disabled vets.”

“I walked into the room and I could tell that my mother had slept with my husband.”

“The ghostly face of Amelia Earhart / Thomas Edison / Moll Flanders revealed itself in my Starbucks cup and changed my life forever.” [Bummer for you if you had just decided an article on Amelia’s feminism and disturbing dependence on men.]

AI does things really well that used to belong to the writer. AI does Sentimentality—and you know there’s a market there because you counted the number of Christmas movies the Hallmark Channel put out last year. PE does Trend—if there’s a new genre called Horror-RomCom-Fantasy-Romance, LLM has already churned out as many titles as human beings have. PE does Marketing, not that you do such a great job.

And they are effective. People WANT fast, easy reads that cause no personal strain. People want a sob or two on page 35 when one of the puppies is born with a short leg. People want stories with protagonists just like all the other protagonists they’ve slid along with through facile text. This is why MASH and Friends were on the air so long—predictability is comfort.

But how does this affect you as a reader? And perhaps more importantly as a writer? You might have a bald modern little style where the next sentence is predictable. (Are you a Probability Engine?). You might have the same plot twist coming that PE will deliver. (Why does the new boyfriend always end up being verbally abusive, just as Hilary is starting to discover herself?) You might have the same character who becomes wiser, but is so basically good that there can’t be a redemption. (Why is the neighborhood curmudgeon always living alone with three cats? But a little kid down the street now smiles at him.)

In my next couple of installments on this theme, I’ll make a case for writing into a space, and reading into a space, that is foreign to AI. I might call it, “The Rules are Against You.” Or I might not.

Following that, I’d like to make a stab at sidestepping AI’s domain. I might call it, “Beautiful Writing,” and offer several examples in several voices. Or I might decide I’m wrong and we’ll let Gemini write something.

The final episode might be a description of my final edit process, which is a five to six week struggle/romance to make my own language beautiful. Because everyone is (not) interested in the individual writer’s process.