how should writers react to AI?

Scoping Out the Future

AN ANALYSIS

c/o snarkybites.com

NOBODY KNOWS for certain what the artistic future will look like, including in the literary realm, given the approaching flood of AI-generated “art”. But we can make an accurate guess.

A.) The most massive part of the book market will be imitative tomes generated by chatbots. They’ll come from all directions, as they’re already coming from all directions. From hapless writer-wannabes who want the accomplishment of creating a novel or collection of poems or stories without doing any of the work. From content mills in faraway places creating thousands upon thousands of ebooks, as well as the print version, to generate income based on sheer volume. From new tech publishing outfits eager to get in on the AI game, presenting at least the pretense of quality but for whom the goal remains the same: generating income based on volume. Increasingly, much volume will come from the Big Five established conglomerate publishers themselves, who’ve begun recruiting tech people to work in the AI field.

B.) A small number of actual writers with some talent will try to push the envelope of what an AI chatbot can produce– hoping to thereby create innovative new literature (it’s no more than a hope). They’ll find themselves also swamped by the AI deluge, and more, perhaps carrying the same AI brand of aesthetic inferiority and artistic theft.

C.) The current self-publishing/fan fic/genre crowd, whose massive numbers have already congested the book market. Many will turn to AI (many already have) to produce more books faster, which will be self-defeating.

D.) The small press litmag community. For most of them (like ourselves, in part) their steadfast efforts are a labor of love. Survival, though, will become more difficult– unless they find ways to stand out. Which means going beyond either the literary or subliterary templates which permeate their underground realms.

E.) Holding up the tottery fort of the literary present-morphing-swiftly-into-past– especially in New York– will be the literary status quo. While storms rage outside, they’ll cling to their canonical high modern postmodern writings, as if perpetuating an ancient dead language. Like Essenes, they’ll continue to write inscrutable papers about unreadable texts, and hold events– in halls of cloistered academia, or high-brow venues in upscale gentrified neighborhoods– going through the motions of an archaic cult. Shuffling monks in robes, reciting properly approved words, affirming in gesture and invocation their artistic belief system. If asked why, they’ll stare blankly. No one will know.

F.) THEN there will be an alternative. The rebellion. A counterculture positively fighting the inhuman deluge of botbooks and other fake AI-generated crap. Those embracing human creativity and making it new, by returning to our cultural roots– to our forebears; our ancestors– and there finding inspiration. Drawing upon our most human abilities. Not just our underused natural brains– ours, not a machine’s– but especially upon our hearts and our souls. Emotion. Compassion. PASSION. New writing which screams, vibrates, and lives. It won’t be easy: to rediscover ourselves and find artistic purpose and humanity while existing in a soulless artificial world. But we’ll do it.

-Karl Wenclas

The Literary Establishment’s Maginot Line

It’s funny to see reactions to the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI happenings. An increasing number of writers– especially on the low end– have embraced it as a way to get more “product” out there. Doesn’t matter to them if they can generate a novel in a day, or if it’s not at all any good. If it qualifies in their mind as a novel, that’s enough. Some–like the editors at New Pop Lit— are opposing the gathering onslaught. Meanwhile, a large number of writers, particularly those in or connected to the literary establishment, are ignoring it.

One can liken them to the French army in 1940. At war with Nazi Germany, yet believing they were safe behind a supposedly impregnable series of forts known as the Maginot Line. The forts were a psychological barrier more than anything– false security which enabled the French not to have to think about that which awaited just outside the gates, so to speak– and which swiftly with the roar of dive bombers and tanks came racing through the Ardennes Forest to spread terror and mayhem.

Similarly, literary people don’t want to think about AI chatbots. They believe they’re safe, and can wish the devices and the change they bring away. An illusory dream– writers are nothing if not dreamers.

Most out-of-touch of all are literary critics– those you’d assume would be most on top of things. Instead, they’ve tricked themselves into believing they represent a Golden Age of American literary criticism (I’m not making this up). A Golden Age nobody’s heard of, consisting of writers nobody knows. The height of insularity and arrogance. It’d be like the Essenes– authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls– circa 30 AD designating their inscrutable writings and themselves as a Golden Age.

The reality? I think of auto exec Bob Lutz’s remark about the General Motors car business before it went bankrupt: “brilliantly executed mediocrity.”

It’ll take way more than that to stem the coming tide of AI.

(The Save the Writer petition.)

-K.W.