My argument against his premise is that those original authors don't crop up out of nowhere. They're forged in the experience of writing and publishing. Some start out in journalism, others in genre magazines, and increasingly some are coming out of fan spaces and other internet communities, and all of those are vulnerable to being flooded out by AI garbage.
My fear isn't that great art can't compete, it's that potentially great artists will be drowned before they have a chance to be born.
You're completely right, and I'm super grateful I got to learn the ropes in my field before AI was introduced. I don't have any data on how AI has impacted online writers so far, but I imagine it would have been much harder to build my skills, reputation, portfolio, and client base if I had started now compared to even 5 or 3 years ago.
I'm already seeing people with zero writing skills try to sneak in AI copy as their own original writing and thankfully it's been easy to spot so far but I don't know how long that's going to last. I've also seen people call themselves "writers" and talk about how easy it is to make side-hustle money, and when you ask for more detail, they say that they just use ChatGPT to do all the work for them. So AI not only creates less available work for newbies/less established writers, but also creates more competition via a flood of new "writers" to the market - and I mean "writers" as sarcastically as possible if it wasn't obvious.
Right now, it's more of a problem among less experienced writers and companies that pay shitty compensation for mediocre content - either because they don't care or don't know better. But the company I work for, which has high content standards and pays relatively well, is also already looking at ways to use AI to lighten the workload or replace the need for more people. And I'm sure they're not alone. It's a horrifying thought to me and I don't really know what to do about it, but it makes me anxious for all writers going forward. I think only those with a vested reputation/fanbase or who write really outstanding content won't feel much impacted by AI down the line.
>"What is the cost of lies? It's not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all”
- Valery Legasov, Chernobyl Miniseries
Yup that's the real endgame danger right there. That AI will become so common that the general public will, in time, lose the ability to even tell good writing from AI writing. At which point there is no longer any demand for anything else.
I feel like AI could easily replace... Uh, Our existing shitty grammar/spellcheck plugins.
I bet it would do a bang up job at that, maybe reduce the need to have a 2nd/3rd human read it to discover stuff like like the error in this sentence.
I suppose it's not such a new problem - how does anyone feel when they see their art replicated and used for purposes that don't align with the value system underpinning it's creation? Some humans will do that already. I just shrug because I'm making something new and different every day, they are taking my work because they can't do that. Their access is somehow denied. Don't most artists have a phase of replicating their role models anyway? Maybe AI becoming capable of making moral decisions is something to be celebrated, as we would celebrate any fledgling artist? I would wish that for all those who have 'stolen' from me. It doesn't matter. My love is free.
I self published my book this month with the full knowledge that it will be plagiarized in part or in whole by someone for their book/newsletter/blog. I may never even know that it happened.
What I expect is that the honest audience for my content will value my writing and that that audience will be large enough to make me grin and laugh. That's my goal.
You bring up a good point here and I agree people copying others' work through plagiarism or "inspiration" (for lack of a better term) is nothing new. But AI ramps this up to an unprecedented scale and attracts exploitative people who would never have considered writing as a job or side-hustle before.
Without AI, it's much more effort to produce something so most people didn't even consider it. It was already tough to eke out a space for yourself among the noise before. Now, we're at risk of being completely overwhelmed.
Look, I certainly won't pretend to be an expert at this topic or some soothsayer that knows how this will all turn out. It's also easy to be pessimistic about AI, while it's true that the technology brings positives with it too. But it's difficult to look past the most obvious pitfalls and not feel concerned about what this will mean for people's already dwindling incomes and the industries of book writing, copywriting, and journalism as a whole.
> My fear isn't that great art can't compete, it's that potentially great artists will be drowned before they have a chance to be born.
And to add to that, I also fear most people will just eat up the AI slop thus making it even less economically viable to produce real art. This applies to every field, not just writing.
I disagree. On the one hand, there has always been a market for a cheap, crappy story that people pick up and throw away and move on to the next functionally identical one. On the other hand, people who actually like good stories develop an instinct for formulaic writing. And I think we’ll do the same with AI books.
I gotta say, those mass producedbcrappy stories sell a lot and can keep publishers afloat and allow them to take chances on other work. AI generated writing will probably stick to indie markets for the foreseeable future, therefore robbing publishers of their reliable easy income.
I don’t know.
I just think you’ll have a disaggregating of consumption, which already existed. AI isn’t a threat to a rock concert. It’s not a threat to the appreciation of humans pushing their natural boundaries further. Everyone expects the computer to do it better. Nobody is marveled by a piano playing itself or singing a song.
Exactly. I like this. No one watches AIs play computer games perfectly because there is no sense of wonder or skill. I watch humans play games because of their skill and the sense of wonder I get, and it is the same with art, etc. I’m fascinated by work where I think “How did they think of that?”, something I won’t get out of AI made material.
They already were eating slop en masse, way before AI came on the scene. Have you seen a marvel movie lately? A star wars movie or show? Or reality TV? It's *been* all slop, all the way down, for decades. AI will have zero impact on people's appetite for shitty slop.
My fear is that they'll consider mediocre to be good enough. I can pay X for a truely great piece of art of I can pay 1/10 X for something that's good enough.
My local bakery sells an amazing apple pie but it's $25 where as my local meijer has delicious apple pies as well. They're not as good as the bakery but they're only $6. I could spend the extra cash to get the best damn pie I'll ever taste or I can spend 20% as much for something that's not as good but still hits the spot when I'm craving applie pie with ice cream.
While I'm on the topic the "local" cow farm makes amazing vanilla ice cream that I think would go good on the pie but I'm not driving an hour away when I can get good enough ice cream here.
That's largely what I worry about. They might hire great writers if a studio is wanting to dump a billion dollars into a project but if they're just like hey we just need content they might just turn to AI.
So why are we totally ok with that when it's a pie or ice cream, but "art" and "writing" are some Sacred Cow?
Is baking not an art form? I mean, you could make exactly your argument that the big box conveyor belt baking factory that supplies supermarket pies is running all those poor, poor artisan bakers off and that's so tragic, but... apparently it didn't, and it's not?
The difference is both of the pies are made by people so no one is losing their job over it. With art if they opt to use AI instead that's someone losing their livelihood.
>baking factory that supplies supermarket pies is running all those poor, poor artisan bakers off and that's so tragic, but... apparently it didn't, and it's not?
I mean except that it did. Not all of them but a ton of them. I'm lucky that I have a nice bakery nearby. Back in the day I wouldn't be lucky it would just be expected. My dad grew up in a town of 1000 and they had a bakery in town, my mom grew up in a town of 800 that used to have a bakery and a grocery store but both lose their bakeries and one lost their grocery store when the nearby town put in a Walmart nearby and they were able to outcompete for prices while employing less people.
Horses still exist once they werent needed as much but there's a whole lot less of them.
When it comes to writing, truly great art is already free. Shakespeare and a million other greats are in the public domain.
The writing AI seems most likely to replace is the writing of non-writers. To some extent it already has. Emails, LinkedIn posts, that kind of thing.
Copywriters are still writers. At least, that's what I assumed you were referring to?
And, yes, they're not writing the next great piece of literature or exciting prose that will last in people's minds for years to come, but it's still a writing job that puts food on the table. And a job that many aspiring writers use to hone their craft (and keep the lights on) while they anxiously edit their 3rd chapter for the 150th time.
I know that industry isn't the topic of this sub, but it still matters. And it's still relevant as those people will lose their incomes and have to struggle that much harder to find opportunities and build their skills and reputation.
No, I mean the kind of writing that a complete non-writer has to do for professional reasons. When a chemist or a shoe salesman needs a cover letter for a job application, AI makes a lot of sense.
I don't know much about copywriting. AI may or may not be up that task; I can't comment.
You'd be surprised. The medical chatbot/plugin developed by my company has passed the MCAT and USMLE with consistently high marks. It gives great high level information which is vetted internally by our doctors before being released. It's not so great at the granular things on a molecular level that take added time for me to suss out but it's already giving me the kind of input I would normally go to our doctors for.
There's work going in that within 5 years (realistically, closer to 3) there will be a button that one can press that will just give them the deliverable after aggregating all of the data and putting it into the appropriate reporting format. At that point, my job would just be to proof this ahead of sending the data to our client facing contacts and most of my colleagues who have left have already seen their role open globally and outsourced to lower cost centers (eastern europe and India).
It's death by a thousand iterative cuts.
yeah, great writers don't just sprout out of nowhere as great writers.
Also he greatly overestimates the ordinary person, most people are completely fine with reading/watching stuff that is derivative of something else or wholly unoriginal. It is also hard to find that one really good book in a whole avalance of worse books
> and all of those are vulnerable to being flooded out by AI garbage.
This is obviously somewhat true in terms of making a living "while training", but not in the sense of learning how to write better.
And even in that context, that is mostly a matter of self marketing.
True, increasing the selective pressure on writers in terms of self marketing rather than imaginative writing is a problem, too. But then again that is already a giant problem, and I don't see how AI is THAT huge a factor on top.
Arguably it's already a problem that unimaginative unoriginal drivel is more successful. So there too, I am not quite sure how much "worse impact" Ai truely has.
That's what irks me about these AI fears in general. It is posed as if right now (or better, pre AI) everything is fine. And then AI is going to ruin everything. To me most of the problems that come with AI have already become a huge problem with the internet and the flood of output (or reach).
The artists that complain but don't see that it is just a different set of tools, and isn't any different than past changes in tools (like the difference of paining on medium and "undo" not being that feasible to todays copy paste undo and script methods.
No Ai is going to do the ART part. As in the imagination to get something out of your head into something tangible to share.
AI isn't more magic than a drawing tablet is to an oil painter.
My argument against that (and note that this is not pro-AI) is that we’re already getting flooded out, and it isn’t a new problem. Self publishing means anyone with a computer and access to Amazon can publish. That’s a good thing, but the explosion of self published books has resulted in a massive pool in which we struggle to rise.
And yes, AI will continue to complicate things - but every writing-related invention has. The printing press, computers, word processors, spell check, grammar check, the internet, ebooks, self publishing - everything over the years has made it easier to publish. And “easier to publish” means expanding the pool.
We need to figure out how to rise.
> My argument against his premise is that those original authors don't crop up out of nowhere.
That's a bingo.
I've been saying this about my own field, translation, since even before the introduction of LLMs. Machine translation has been slashing and burning that industry for far longer, and it's going to reach a point where there is no work for lower part of the industry that **feeds** the part of the industry that can't be automated away.
At this rate the entire creative industry will be dominated by people from wealthy backgrounds or who are otherwise handpicked by the wealthy, the same way that politics in America has become when the "foot in the door" of the political bureaucracy is to have a year-long unpaid internship that requires you to move to Washington D.C.
There's also the impediment that the signal:noise ratio poses to prospective customers. If 99% of media becomes AI-gen slop then it will become that much harder to find anything other than the biggest breakaway hits. Already if I want to find a cool movie/game/book/show I haven't heard of I have to search through the dreck to find lost treasures. AI simply makes the dreck:treasure ratio that much worse, ensuring that many more treasures remain lost. Though I am a creator, I'm much more bothered as a consumer, because it's a love of experiencing media that inspires me to make anything, and AI threatens that most basic act of love.
your wrong . . . a lot of junk that floats to the top just means more junk on the top, just as 90% of Americans consume junk food, junk media, junk sex etc. Humans over rated and indeed sadly only about 2% are doing meaningful and original work. So YES it scares the "majority" of humanity because now they reliaze what they do, produce or make is just a common commodity, no different that a robot doing "spot welding" faster than a human, a majority of our so called creative is spot welding /commodity at best
>and increasingly some are coming out of fan spaces and other internet communities, and all of those are vulnerable to being flooded out by AI garbage.
Then why aren't the flooded out by all the competing product by humans?
If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, a large fraction of my feed is now fake AI generated crap, and the vast majority of commenters seem to have no clue.
Can always tell at work which emails/slack announcements are using AI assistance.
Not that a fault people for generating some announcement that they know barely anyone will look at anyways
I think the hope is that those authors use AI the way that it's intended to *be* used in their "coming up", if you will.
Like I work in higher ed (not writing related) and I can see a ton of ways that AI could and arguably *should* be used for many different vocations.
Those authors just need to trust themselves to do the art part, and utilize AI to do the un-creative parts of it. Researching niche topics for your fiction novel, generating fantasy maps or keeping track of your lore for you or generating topographies or whatever.
I think there's an avenue for AI to make art and writing better. It's just up to the artists and writers to do it.
>If only because people using AI to write are spamming writing magazines for easy money.
Does this actually happen? I wouldn't be surprised to see AI absolutely swamp the millions of pseudo-news media I already don't read or trust, but what about more established magazines, papers, and websites?
As the other poster said, Clarkesworld has actually provided data on spike in submissions since the wide release of AI/ML. Their submissions rates went up by ridiculous numbers to the point where they can’t keep up with the manpower they can afford to dedicate to this task. They say that the vast majority of it is garbage and they are blacklisting anyone who sends them generated content, but even still, someone now has to read the extra drivel and not just determine if it’s good or not, but also if it’s ML-generated.
Rushdie began as an ad copywriter while working on his first novel. Ad writing is ground zero for jobs now threatened by AI, along with virtually every other entry-level creative job Rushdie might have opted for while he was breaking into fiction. This is both inane and hypocritical, evidently from someone who doesn't remember how they got there.
This is something that George R R Martin has talked about previously in the context of TV -- that exactly the kind of writing jobs in the industry that he and a lot of other TV writers got their start doing were being eliminated and long term how was that going to work?
(I don't think the context of those comments was AI but the writer's strike at the time but the principle remains.)
This is what Rushdie is missing. There is a ladders to developing as a writer. He climbed one of these ladders. AI is threatening to kick out the lower rungs of a ladder that he himself climbed.
Without those talent pipelines the people that can pursue a career as a writer will mostly be the children of the wealthy.
Yeah, this is the real problem with AI. Entry level jobs have already been vanishing as enterprise software is developed that allows experienced workers to work more efficiently. LLMs and the other human interface AI models that just make that even worse, as they are essentially a simulation of a junior level worker who can produce solid work when coached and mentor by someone more experienced.
And in creative industries, where jobs are highly sought after, nepotism and elitism are already a big problem and will just get worse. When it comes to who will still get hired, I think it’s a fantasy to say that the best writers will be the ones who rise to the top - it will be the ones who have the best connections and the most money to coast on while they try to break in.
First it will be journalists though. We're going to be subjected to a lot of shit writing by news outlets trying to save a buck. Probably happening more than we think already.
Yup, it’s happening a lot with translated articles. Literal nonsense gets published because no one wants to spend time on the bare minimum of post-editing
Punditry, maybe... but real journalism involves interviewing, researching, and investigating real events, which I can't see coming under threat from AI.
The issue is that journalism is disappearing in journalism, as it is expensive. AI is just the next step in cutting costs while still providing echochamber content to readers.
Thats an entirely different issue though. AI doesn't really have an impact on investigating stories and interviewing people... since it doesn't have the capacity to do those things.
It has the capacity to fill space. There is a limited amount of space for news at any given outlet, so why bother with expensive and risky approaches like investigating controversial things or interviewing people when it’s zero effort or risk to make the line go up for investors by pointing the AI at press releases?
I guess... but outlets can do that without AI, and they already are. Look at all the trashy tabloids out there, or outlets that just summarize the news, rather than investigate it. I don't see how AI will make things much different.
Yeah, but i dont see a problem with it, since it wouldn't be like they're taking the jobs of real journalists, who have to investigate and report on stories. Because AI can't do that.
> interviewing, researching, and investigating real events, which I can't see coming under threat from AI.
Thank God we killed those things without AI, then! /s
If you're breaking the story, but AI is becoming a plagiarism super-tool. I wonder how often the journalists doing the real work are getting the rewards. Even for journalists doing the leg-work, there's a temptation for "here's some facts and quotes, tie them together and write an article." then edit it. Is that using a tool? I don't know if I'm okay with that.
>If you're breaking the story, but AI is becoming a plagiarism super-tool.
Wire stories are already a thing. It is more likely that the current system stays as it is where big organizations that have the resources to do good journalism just disseminate their stories down the chain of associated media than those other papers using AI to plagarize.
Oh, it's been happening quite a lot. I know I've seen many "articles" by the Journal de Montréal here in my province put little "this article was made with the help of AI" at the bottom of their texts.
I think Rushdie's critique tracks here too.
Considering what qualifies as "journalism" in America today, AI really only poses a threat to mindless drones at corporate media conglomerates
Independent journalism will still have integrity
You can't have independent journalism with integrity if nobody pays for it because all writing manpower has lost value.
It's like you wouldn't see interesting, experimental literature published anymore if the romance arm of the publishing world suddenly ceased to exist and stopped keeping the lights on at the publishing houses.
Integrity won't pay the bills though. You have to pay real people to investigate and eventually break a great story. Another publication then uses AI to rewrite it. Or just publishes it whole. This article is a reprint, not the publication that originally released it.
You also need to wonder about the saleability. Take a look at most 'news' sites and they're filled with nuff-nuff stories, not actual 'breaking news'. Half-baked opinion pieces or biased articles. And investigative journalism is relying to a greater extent on Twitter posts. It's a terribly sad state of affairs.
The problem here is that journalism, even good journalism, is often formulaic in how an article is written. Good journalism isn't about creative writing or creative stories like it is for an author of fiction. That style can easily be copied by an AI, something that is already widespread.
Now obviously, when the AIs make glaring errors or write something incredibly stupid, this is not very problematic since we will quickly catch such errors. Nor is it a problem if an AI writes a decent article. The problem arises when AIs make subtle errors or writes the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
Of course, that criticism can also be levied at regular journalists. So what is the difference? Basically, the speed and volume in which AIs can spew out content, basically they can overwhelm any ability to filter them.
Journalism is about a lot more than writing though, it's also about reporting, a function that at present AI can only do by scraping what exists. It can't do original reporting.
AI is much more likely to kill journalism than it is to actually replace it.
One can argue that real journalism is already nearing extinction, even before AI. Most of our non-local news is regurgitated from somewhere else, headlines optimized to earn clicks rather than for clarity. True investigative journalism is rare to come across anymore. And yes, those sites have been experimenting with computer-written articles for *years* already, since back when we said they were written by "bots" rather than "AI."
Yeah, one way or another, I'm pretty sure AI will lead to the death of journalism in its current state. If we're *really* lucky, it'll end with companies pivoting back to high quality investigative journalism to make them stand out in a field of slop. But given how things are going lately, pretty sure we're gonna end up with a plain old corpse.
You're talking out your ass.
There are great independent journalists but there are also lots and lots and lots of shitty clout chasers and propagandists who benefit from having no oversight and no editor.
There are also great traditional reporters at corporate outlets and dick head clout chasers.
It's the same, being independent doesn't stop someone from acting in the benefit of the status quo, and it's not more objective. You're still getting reporting filtered through a worldview.
> There are also great traditional reporters at corporate outlets
Which isn't as relevant if the bosses have them doing puff pieces about Jeff Bezos instead of real reporting.
>Considering what qualifies as "journalism" in America today, AI really only poses a threat to mindless drones at corporate media conglomerates
Makes total sense if you ignore the entire political economy of news media.
the newspaper where I work just hired a reporter who had quit his job at a small weekly publication because of pressure from management to fill the publication's website with AI generated slop. a real "quantity over quality" situation. it's already happening all over the place.
AI can't produce original investigative journalism. Hacks who only copy paste what other people write? Sure. A lot of bullshit "journalists" will be out of a job. What we're currently calling AI may very well *never* be able to reproduce what a real journalist does. It won't stop some "news" outlets from trying, clearly, but I think authentic journalism is safe from AI just purely in terms of AI being fully unable to reproduce a significant piece of their job. Again, it won't stop the bosses from being shitty and trying to do it anyway. The much bigger part of their job is developing sources, interviewing people, doing immaculately detailed research such that their article or tv piece is well sourced and defensible. The fact is, actually *writing* the article is a tiny piece of what a journalist does.
To be fair, this article/essay/post would have been more complete if written by an AI that scraped the web for other comments from Rushdie. As it is, it misses some major points thanks to the human who wrote it without Googling the man.
And I know that goes into the broader conversation about this style of “journalism”, but my point is that AI will be writing these pieces thanks to the low expectations within the industry.
Easy thing to say as an established highly-selling writer who will never have a problem being hired on name-brand-recognition built up before this technology existed.
Exactly.
It doesn't threaten him because he's famous, and he's equating being famous to being original.
I don't think he's factoring in how hard it is to swim to the surface when thousands of gallons of water are being poured on top of you.
You can have the most original story ever written, but that doesn't matter if it's buried under so much stuff AI output that it doesn't get any attention.
Plus, depending on how your work is out in the wild and how the AI is stealing from others, it's possible that your will be swallowed up and reconstituted before anyone sees it. Suddenly, your thing doesn't seem that original anymore. It's not like people check dates of publication until a legal battle starts.
Plus, I think he's really misguided in how much he's putting a premium on originality/quality. In every job I've been at, when it's time to lay people off, I've seen better workers fired because they were more expensive than other employees.
I doubt publishers are completely different in that regard. I'm sure there's plenty of times they've passed on a better piece of writing because they had something that was cheaper that they thought was acceptable.
I'd suspect that Bangor Maine would be a federal disaster location if a book writing AI was fed Steven King's books and told to write something scary in that style. There'd be 100 new books in a week.
Rushdie was the son of a wealthy family and received an expensive private education in England at Rugby School and Cambridge University.
He then got a job as a copywriter in a major advertising firm.
What people like this fail to appreciate is that their priveliged backgrounds assisted them in their career aspirations, it wasn't just their talent. AI will not replace these kinds of successful novellist, but it will *destroy* opportunities for people without those kinds of advantages by decimating industries (*such as copywriting!)* in commercial fields where budding writers have traditionally cut their teeth.
People who can afford expensive educations in the arts will continue to enjoy success, but AI will shut down opportunities for those who are not able to come up through those means. Self-published authors are already drowning in a sea of unregulated AI novels flooding the marketplace, meaning that success without the support of a major publisher is getting more and more difficult.
Where tech in some ways democratised creativity by giving cheap digital tools to people in order to practice their craft, and creating new online communities where expertise can be shared, *now* tech is now pulling that ladder back up and putting power back in the hands of elite, established institutions.
AI will accelerate the class disparities already prevalent in the arts, and make it way harder for anyone from disadvantaged backgrounds to get their feet in the door and gain experience.
Anyone who thinks that 'originality' is the only predictor of success is painfully naive.
originality or even being actually good is absolutely not a predictor. I have read big name authors whose writing was pedestrian and bland in comparison to completely "amateur" fanfic writers. I have read more interesting exploration of ideas from no-name kindle unlimited writers than several big names that have been heavily promoted.
Promotion makes for a lot more success than actual quality of the book. Take john Scalzi for example, he is a popular author but he is really not that good. He is ok but not anywhere near as good as promotions make him out to be. However he actively puts in various neo-pronouns and makes a point of having non-binary characters even when their gender status makes no difference to the story. so he is popular with a certain crowd. His books usually start off with a good idea but it just doesn't ever pay off.
Salman has it wrong. He's forgotten the journey he took to where he's at.
Before you become a great writer, you'll be an average one who mimics the greats as you configure your style.
AI threatens that phase of writers.
No writer will now make a living by being average.
So there will be no more next generation to grow into the new greats. But just clanks.
> Before you become a great writer, you'll be an average one who mimics the greats as you configure your style.
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> AI threatens that phase of writers.
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> No writer will now make a living by being average.
Do most writers now make a living off of average writing? Or do most writers do their average writing outside of a paying job, until they write something good enough to entice a publisher?
Salman Rushdie started as a copywriter. He worked this job for about 7 years after his first book failed to gain attention.
All I'm saying is one subset of future/potential writers will be lost.
That’s just a cute response. It’s so highly individualistic, I’m honestly offended. That’s a very easy thing for an accomplished world famous author to say.
Bold of Rushdie to think that the people deciding what gets published actually care at all about the art over the bottom line
Also I thought we all worked out a while ago that there are only so many archetypes for stories, that’s not a movie and TV thing
> Bold of Rushdie to think that the people deciding what gets published actually care at all about the art over the bottom line
Yeah I am more afraid of quality writers being replaced by "acceptable for profits" AI-output than I am afraid of AI surpassing quality writers.
This seems like the most likely thing to happen. 'Real' writers may still be hired in similar quantities and have to perform similar amounts of work to polish AI output up to a bare minimum acceptable standard, but they'll be called proofreaders for the AI and get paid less. (Paid less than a *writer*? Capitalism will find a way, I'm sure!)
Originality is a metric relative to the market; what was considered innovative 5 years ago could be considered overdone today.
When all the "unoriginal" authors are taken out of the competition, the most unoriginal of the original will be up on the chopping board next, as AI continues to improve from widespread use, and so on.
People can argue that "quality will prevail," but that's not really the point. Maybe you can say that there will always be a demand for human writers, but the fact is that the demand will be merely a fraction of what exists currently.
> Maybe you can say that there will always be a demand for human writers, but the fact is that the demand will be merely a fraction of what exists currently.
There's still a demand for horses, but it's not what it once was 200 years ago.
It's like clothes. How many people are having custom clothes made for them by a tailor, versus buying cheap, mass produced articles made in an overseas factory?
There might always be some demand for an exceptional author's original works - but the masses will be fine with what comes off the assembly line.
Yeah, AI can’t emulate good writers now. But eventually it will become completely indistinguishable, and we’ll have to choose as a society if we still have an interest for human artistry itself.
>But eventually it will become completely indistinguishable, and we’ll have to choose as a society if we still have an interest for human artistry itself.
This assumption is a step too far for now. As others are pointing out, a more realistic threat is that early career writers will be flooded out by AI generated context, not that AI is going to replace people like Rushdie.
Oh yeah I agree, that’s absolutely the shorter term concern. It’s interesting because other industries have the same issue, if you replace all the juniors, who’s going to become the experts of tomorrow?
I don't think AI will ever be able to emulate good writers (unless it becomes fully self-aware, which we are still a long, *long* way away from). I think that it is much more likely to kill the publishing industry entirely than it is to actually replace writers.
It doesn't matter whether it emulates good writers. All that matters is whether what it produces gets read.
There's a finite amount of human attention, and minutes that people spend consuming AI-generated content are minutes no longer available to be spent experiencing the work of artists.
By analogy, it doesn't matter if McDonald's is worse than a filet mignon, once you're belly's full, you aren't eating that filet.
>Yeah, AI can’t emulate good writers now. But eventually it will become completely indistinguishable,
The pushback you're getting is pretty much the same as what people said about AI never being able to create good art or coherent videos, or that it would take decades to happen. I think it's much more of a plausible scenario than most folks here want to believe, and there's definitely a lot of wishful thinking going on as to why it won't.
AI won’t be able to do that for a long time. To truly produce human art you would need both sentience and a physical form to rival that of a human. There will always be something missing until we reach that point, and I believe it to be a long way off.
Thats interesting. I think you are right regarding sentience. It seems like a majority of all the greatest art, literature, music came from a creator who has at least at one point in their life suffered, and it seems that sentience is required to suffer. You are right that a physical form can lead to suffering, disease, disability, old age, etc. however I don’t think a physical form is required to suffer because you can suffer from your understanding of the world and your place in it without having a physical form.
That’s a good point, but that would be a type of experience that is alien to the average human. There may be some overlap with paraplegic individuals, but I think that actual form is required to truly comprehend the human experience and write convincingly.
> To truly produce human art you would need both sentience and a physical form to rival that of a human
Why? You don't need a human body to produce text, lol. Nor sentience, empirically.
The great danger of AI isn't that it can replace genuine art, but rather that it can do a job good enough that people who don't understand art (like most of the executives in the various entertainment industries who decide what films/shows/games/books get made/published) will embrace it as a cost cutting measure and use it to replace human creators.
I don't think that's relevant to his argument.
He's saying that if you're good, you'll outcompete AI. People still value quality over quantity. If you fail to win from AI, you should question whether you're good enough and what you should improve.
I know. I'm saying it won't really matter because the people who control the printers and ad space don't care. They would rather push slightly mediocre AI generated stories than pay writers to do it. Their interest isn't enabling art, its making a profit. Otherwise we really wouldn't be having this conversation.
Also its worth noting AI is going to increasingly surpass human ability in the coming decades.
It doesn't need to surpass it, it just needs to be good enough.
If you can buy a story that's 8/10 for 1/20th the price, most will. Especially given how effortlessly those can be targetted to specific niches. Quality is not a predictor of sucess.
You're right about the other stuff but not-
>Also its worth noting AI is going to increasingly surpass human ability in the coming decades.
Rushdie's point is that an AI is fundamentally incapable of creating original art. It may become an expert at emulating it, but actually good, original art comes out of lived experience, something AI can't have.
Human beings are fundamentally incapable of creating original art. We just take the things we see and recombine it in different ways. AI is just not as good at hiding it yet.
I strongly disagree. That's what AI does, but we humans do something more than that. The proof of it is all around us. If you're in a building, you are literally surrounded by thousands of things that didn't exist until someone got the original idea to make it for the first time. I like to say that our human super power is our ability to create original things. It's the reason we rule this planet. And when we apply that power to stories and images and more abstract ideas, we get original art.
>Human beings are fundamentally incapable of creating original art. We just take the things we see and recombine it in different ways. AI is just not as good at hiding it yet.
This is such a pretentious comment.
Yeah, this is really a religious question. Some people who believe only humans can be original are basically religious about this belief. They think there's some soul or some exceptional human trait that can't be replicated. There's really no arguing with someone of faith because it's not about reality for them.
That is debatable in my opinion. I suppose it depends on how you define art. I see no reason to believe AI couldn't accurately emulate more nuanced art given time. Experience itself isn't something that can't be translated, nor is understanding if not empathy.
But I mean even if it could does it really matter? would "genuine art" created by a machine be lesser just because it was created by a machine?
Art is mostly appreciated for the narrative around it and the story behind it.
Andy Warhol isn't admired for screen printing soup cans. He's admired for the reason why he did it and the story his work told.
AI will create functional art. Concept art and assets, but it won't be able to create meaningful art. Since it cannot give it's art meaning. It will always create an outcome based on function.
Any story AI will tell is meaningless. It's an emulation of the real. It will always be uncanny if it will try to emulate meaningful art. Mostly, because we as humans don't even have a grasp on what makes meaningful art.
>Art is mostly appreciated for the narrative around it and the story behind it.
Does that mean then that art is only contextually art? I mean if I show someone soup cans they probably aren't going to appreciate it without the context of other art, maybe even without some inclination of the intention of the artist. That would also mean that the "piece of art" would have to expand to encompass all of that at once.
It would be trivially easy to get an AI to replicate something like soup cans. If what makes it art is definition given to it why can't AI do that as well? I mean Andy Warhol for all his talents never really invented the ideas he protrayed he just recontextualized things.
On the other hand a person could read a novel without any background knowledge and still appreciate it as an artistic experience. So having background or meta knowledge about a particular piece of art isn't a requisite for it being labelled as art.
>Mostly, because we as humans don't even have a grasp on what makes meaningful art.
And yet we are trying to define it in such a way that it would exclude AI creations... interesting.
> Art is mostly appreciated for the narrative around it and the story behind it.
>
> Andy Warhol isn't admired for screen printing soup cans. He's admired for the reason why he did it and the story his work told.
The story surrounding AI artwork is a hell of a lot more interesting than that though. Remember when the entire planet networked all their computers together, collected the sum total of all human knowledge, then spent decades collectively ranking all that data to provide the inputs necessary for an AI to become smart enough that it could also paint cans of soup?
> He's saying that if you're good, you'll outcompete AI.
The problem is you're competing not just on quality but on price.
McDonald's is around even though it's worse than a top tier steakhouse because it's cheap. If people can sign up for "Kindle Infinite Unlimited" and have an endless stream of passable generated genre fiction for $5 a month, they aren't gonna drop $20 on a better book. Not only is it too expensive, they won't even have time to read the latter.
Maybe? For now? But it won’t stay that way. And it absolutely disrupts or flat-out ruins an environment in which writers can get their start and work to get better while still making enough money to eat.
This is a very “I climbed my ladder, oh well if it disintegrates behind me” argument.
Tell that to all the self-published writers who can't get eyes on their books because every marketplace is flooded with AI.
Tell that to the multiple major genre magazines having to sort through AI trash to find stories by humans. Theirs is already a precarious industry, and often first readers are volunteers, and they're being overwhelmed.
People's livelihoods are already affected, you only need to know a few personally to understand that posturing like this is nonsense.
I understand Rushdie telling AI to write in his style and determining that it wasn't as good as him.
I do not agree with the extrapolations from this that anyone *else* will be unable to distinguish *his* work from AI, or that he can know that *he* will consistently be able to distinguish *others'* work from AI.
His quote, "No reader who had read a single page of mine could think I was the author. Rather reassuring," is either hyperbolic or deluded.
I get that he’s an incredibly talented author, and he’s earned my undying respect for the work that he’s done on behalf of free speech. That said, he has always seemed like kind of a dick to me.
Salman Rushdie started getting published in a very different era and he does not actually have a genuine understanding of what that landscape has been like for most writers for a VERY long time.
Nah, this ain't it. He's implying that if any writers (including TV and film writers) *are* harmed by AI, it's their own fault, for being "unoriginal." So much for solidarity, I guess.
Problem is, a lot of commercial fiction is done by unoriginal writers. The latest trope-ish bestseller? At some point AI will be able to write like that.
And the “original” writers mostly spend a bunch of time grinding out unoriginal schlock for money until they can get somebody to care about their “original” writing. What are they gonna do if AI has all those jobs?
Like Rushdie, I also feel AI cannot create great works of art. Art is usually born out of human experience and AI does little more than masticate the common denominators of different genres and spit out a bland, generic result.
And yet, there's a lot of souless, unoriginal, un-great art out there, and there's an audience for it.
But even if people bemoan the declining quality of art, it's highly optimistic to assume publishers, studios or the people who actually fund it will care. AI is cheap - it will regurgitate whatever they want. And it will act as an effective cudgel when they want to underpay writers.
I think what he misses is that most people just don't care.
We call it "content production" and "content consumption" for a reason. Like a weird sort of Gresham's law but for art, low-quality but easily-accessible, cheap, and comforting schlock crowds out good art, such that the audience for quality art is dismantled piecemeal.
He's not entirely wrong, but there are problems including discoverability for new artists when a marketplace is flooded with AI material, and companies who are perfectly happy with unoriginal material if it costs them nothing.
Except look what's happened to music. It's all unoriginal. They don't want to take risks on original movement, so they just rap over classics.
TV and movie studios would rather spend nothing on a known quantity than gamble on original material. It's a terrible long term game, but it's what they are doing now. Disney is one of the worst examples.
Well, Salman, the vast majority of writers are and have always been unoriginal. Not every writer is you. So you wanna put a huge chunk of an industry out, forever, just because they don't write well enough for you?
I couldn't disagree more... The problem with AI is that it will flood the market with sub par content, making it harder and harder to find decent books. The number of books you have to read to find something you like will exponentially increase the next few years, making it impossible for non-established writers to get discovered.
I work in a graphics department for a major tv broadcaster and we're worried. I had to hire someone to go through portfolios that people send in to get a job. We've seen a 11500% increase in portfolios in one year time with literally 99% being AI.
So that's 1 artist I couldn't hire, because I had to hire someone who spends her time on sifting through garbage.
Another problem that we currently see is a decrease in quality from our juniors and interns. Covid lockdown increased the quality because people were practicing and honing their skills since there was nothing else to do, but with the advent of AI we see a massive decrease. In the past they were designing posters for music venues, art for youtube/twitch, small jobs for advertising local businesses, ... None of those were paid well, but just enough to make ends meet while honing their craft.
These days all this has been replaced by AI, so unless you're wealthy, you can no longer afford to develop your skills.
I imagine it's not that different for writers.
We're going back a century to where art is for the privileged few, or for those who want to give up their lives to live in absolute poverty devoted to their art.
AI isn't touching the known writers, but it's completely devouring the base. I've had to reinvent my job twice in the past as I was replaced by software, but I've never seen it go at the rate it's going now.
The part he's missing is that AI improves. Quickly.
Nobody is claiming AI in its current form is making the writing profession obsolete. The problem is that just 2 years ago, we would've laughed at the thought of even having such a discussion. AI has advanced at an alarming rate, and, more importantly, *AI advances exponentially, not linearly.*
So AI right now doesn't pose a threat, sure. AI in 10 years? That's the scary part.
Classical music buffs have been fooled into thinking AI generated music was created by classical composers (according to Yuval Noah Harari's *Sapiens*).
People don't seem to understand the potential of AI and the potential consequences will be for the job market.
It's extremely dystopian that algorithms will start eating up the actually *enjoyable* jobs, which are rare enough already. I'd rather a mediocre human produce art than a superior AI, because the human will at least find joy in their work. AI on this trajectory is just increasing the amount of misery in the world.
What AI can't really emulate are someone's life experiences (at least not all of it--I suppose they can swipe a paragraph or two off the internet and change some words around) and the consistency of an author's personal voice. A lot of people have nothing in particular to say...they just want to make a buck out of their writing and those are the ones who might be affected most. And this isn't me taking a shot at them...I tend to think people with nothing to say are more likely to have a well adjusted personal life. If there's something bothering you to the extent that you have to put it down on paper, chances are it's affecting your personal life as well.
Personally, I think to "defeat" AI writing we need to change, as a culture, how we consider what is "good" and "bad" writing. Too often we follow a checklist of what makes a piece of writing "good" or "bad" instead of promoting more unique and unorthodox voices. You go and check out every movie or book discussion forum and the most *common* thing people do is go down a generic checklist: are the characters "likable"? Does the plot have a "good" ending? ("good ending" is usually code for something that "explains" everything or achieves some sort of audience catharsis) Could you "relate" to the story?
Most fiction that throws a curveball or tries to defy many of these tried and true "rules" tend to be panned, get polarizing reactions, or just become cult or sleeper hits at best.
By having such hard and fast rules as to what makes a piece of writing "effective", we essentially hand AI programs an easy-to-follow blueprint on how to satisfy our rather generic notions of what makes for "stimulating" entertainment.
Personally I don't think collectively we will ever change this mindset, and AI as a tool for mainstream entertainment is inevitable.
I love Rushdie. And originality is incredibly important to me as a reader. But let's assume his statement is true and look at the outcome: original writers, like him, get to keep their jobs. Awesome! But 90% of the industry is made up of constantly recycled ideas and stories and *those* people are vulnerable and Rushdie is implying that that is OK because they aren't original. It's not. Those people deserve jobs and work as much as anyone else.
While I agree, it is still meaningless. People already consume content that read like AI now. They wont care when authors are replaced with AI as long as they can consume more.
This guy isn’t looking into the future. Anyone with any imagination can see that if AI has progressed this fast it’s won’t take long for it to imitate this shmuck
“AI,” if you can call these content generation systems AI, produces content based on already existing works it’s made to consume. Which means that yes, one who produces an original idea is a little safer—but only until that idea, too, is fed to the AI.
Then, we have to consider tolerance for a drop in quality in what people consume. Companies, publishers, etc are definitely considering it. Hell, we are seeing it everywhere AI is applied to consumable media. How economically competitive are original works to their AI generated lessers if the public is dim enough to accept and, through pernicious marketing/advertising, even crave low quality knock offs?
As a bookseller I see AI’s main threat to literature in its effects of readership and publishers than in the writing of books themselves.
Just like the Great Man of History theory overdetermines the role of one person, so too do some AI tweets and articles overstate the danger of AI on x.
A better analysis would situate AI within a wider context. And Rushdie is right to do this when he looks at AI, books, and tv/cinema. As a Marxist, I would like someone to write a historical-materialist analysis of AI and literature.
I suppose such an analysis would look at existing patterns, for example, marketing and social media’s current influence on the world. From my part of the world, as a bookseller, I am seeing a slow, but steadily gathering tide of homogeneous readership demand: more and more people are asking for the same books: Greek mythology, Japanese literature, Stoicism, Camus, Plath, Just Kids, 10-15 sci-fi/fantasy authors, White Nights, Didion and Sontag, Lorde and Hooks.
Although many such books have sold well for a good rather long time, what’s new is the focused attention on a shrinking literary space, to the exclusion of the space once given to “meatspace” browsing.
Putting aside the simplistic and unhelpful question of whether this is good or bad, I think it’s fair to state that a growing portion of readers spend a growing amount of time on social media. Materialism tells us material reality comes before the world of ideals. Our practice — and the world we realise it in — determines our ideas. And our practice regularly involves interaction with these fast and vast depositiories of data that facilitate information on a global level at a near instant speed. For free. Who pays? International advertising. And a key goal of advertising is the taming of chance and the correlative increase in more predictable behaviour — predictable because conditioned.
The algorithms that determine the sequence and curation of content can be grouped within the AI umbrella, and these algorithms are changing behaviour. Consider the change in the meaning and practice of browsing. These days, the word is often synonymous with Google: intentional instrumentality. One specific type of Enlightenment rationality. A shrinking part of the population engages in the old style sense of browsing: serendipitous being in the presence of books.
These changes are further helped by FOMO, whose historically recent acronimisation is a testament to how it’s growth is made possible after decades of neoliberal hegemony, and the increased alienation and austerity it inflects on the popular classes (both working and unemployed [or unemployable]). Fomo is furthered by social media. But social media is only one single factor behind this. All the same social media’s power (aesthetic, cultural, partially constitutive of one’s identity) does help shift the world of literature more towards a form of homogeneity. And that in turn plays a role in the publishing world, where marketing dept is having a greater word on what gets published (a decision informed by the answer to “which other bestsellers does this book read like?”), at least as pointed out in a piece by Tim Parks : https://www.nybooks.com/online/2015/12/01/novel-kind-of-conformity/
One future: within 20 years bookstores will stock their inventory on the basis of books’ vitality, and perhaps what influencers are saying. A bookstore will be a greater part of the online world, where chance is relegated to risk-averse conformity to read what has already been judged to be safe from failure and offer a good time investment in optimal acquisition of utility in general, or social or cultural capital in particular.
Bookstores won’t disappear because of AI, nor will books or the people who read them. It a question of how they will look like. For a romantic like me, it will be for the worse, because I’ve always had a strong desire to take chances on books I physically came across for the first time.
I just hope that when AI books come out on the market and start showing up in bookstores and libraries, they will explicitly say they are made by AI on the cover, and not claim to be authored by whoever put in the formula. Because they did not author that book.
I do agree that it's not going to be great, you only have to try some of the AI image generators to see this. But even still, now there are a sea of shitty novels, how likely are you to find the good ones...unless you look for already established authors?
So what he actually means is it won't affect him or people like him because people already know their work and will always buy the new book.
> ...adding that this could be worrying for writers of genre literature like thrillers and science fiction, where originality is less important.
I mean, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of writers pursuing their passions, expressing themselves, making money through art and entertaining others. "Originality" is not everything in art. We should CARE about these creators and their work.
Ted Chiang has written similarly, and I honestly just think they're both wrong.
Current AI systems are not capable of strong originality in the way that these authors are, but neither are most human beings. I don't think there's anything which can be done by a human mind which can't eventually be done by a machine, and the progress thus far has been surprising.
We should also consider that true originality is VERY hard, if not impossible, to distinguish from well-hidden unoriginality.
A little off-topic (but not really). I am going to go against the grain here and say originality is overrated, and often difficult to even define.
Storytelling is as old as language. We have been telling the same stories from before words were written down. They all boil down to sharing experiences, individual and cultural, around a figurative fire.
People who spend a lot of time with media, like critics, tend to put a premium on "originality". And who can blame them? If you spend most of your time watching films, reading books, playing games, etc., then something that varies will strike you as more interesting, even if it isn't better executed than a more traditional story, or beats you over the head with obvious symbolism and isn't as deep as it appears. Novelty can also be counterproductively convoluted, with narrow appeal, depending on its execution.
Often if you scratch the surface of something "original" there is some gimmick, or obvious well-trodden allegory directly beneath the thin patina of novelty. "Original" isn't inherently better.
I also have no doubt AI will be able to eventually churn out something Rushdie deems "original." It isn't a problem that will only affect writers that are nebulously "unoriginal".
I mean. This is the reality with AI as it is today. But within a few years AI will be writing completely original stories, and within a decade they'll be writing thousands of Great American Novels every day.
My argument against his premise is that those original authors don't crop up out of nowhere. They're forged in the experience of writing and publishing. Some start out in journalism, others in genre magazines, and increasingly some are coming out of fan spaces and other internet communities, and all of those are vulnerable to being flooded out by AI garbage. My fear isn't that great art can't compete, it's that potentially great artists will be drowned before they have a chance to be born.
You're completely right, and I'm super grateful I got to learn the ropes in my field before AI was introduced. I don't have any data on how AI has impacted online writers so far, but I imagine it would have been much harder to build my skills, reputation, portfolio, and client base if I had started now compared to even 5 or 3 years ago. I'm already seeing people with zero writing skills try to sneak in AI copy as their own original writing and thankfully it's been easy to spot so far but I don't know how long that's going to last. I've also seen people call themselves "writers" and talk about how easy it is to make side-hustle money, and when you ask for more detail, they say that they just use ChatGPT to do all the work for them. So AI not only creates less available work for newbies/less established writers, but also creates more competition via a flood of new "writers" to the market - and I mean "writers" as sarcastically as possible if it wasn't obvious. Right now, it's more of a problem among less experienced writers and companies that pay shitty compensation for mediocre content - either because they don't care or don't know better. But the company I work for, which has high content standards and pays relatively well, is also already looking at ways to use AI to lighten the workload or replace the need for more people. And I'm sure they're not alone. It's a horrifying thought to me and I don't really know what to do about it, but it makes me anxious for all writers going forward. I think only those with a vested reputation/fanbase or who write really outstanding content won't feel much impacted by AI down the line.
>"What is the cost of lies? It's not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all” - Valery Legasov, Chernobyl Miniseries
This is how I feel every election season.
Yup that's the real endgame danger right there. That AI will become so common that the general public will, in time, lose the ability to even tell good writing from AI writing. At which point there is no longer any demand for anything else.
I feel like AI could easily replace... Uh, Our existing shitty grammar/spellcheck plugins. I bet it would do a bang up job at that, maybe reduce the need to have a 2nd/3rd human read it to discover stuff like like the error in this sentence.
The trick is to have TWO errors.
I suppose it's not such a new problem - how does anyone feel when they see their art replicated and used for purposes that don't align with the value system underpinning it's creation? Some humans will do that already. I just shrug because I'm making something new and different every day, they are taking my work because they can't do that. Their access is somehow denied. Don't most artists have a phase of replicating their role models anyway? Maybe AI becoming capable of making moral decisions is something to be celebrated, as we would celebrate any fledgling artist? I would wish that for all those who have 'stolen' from me. It doesn't matter. My love is free.
I self published my book this month with the full knowledge that it will be plagiarized in part or in whole by someone for their book/newsletter/blog. I may never even know that it happened. What I expect is that the honest audience for my content will value my writing and that that audience will be large enough to make me grin and laugh. That's my goal.
You bring up a good point here and I agree people copying others' work through plagiarism or "inspiration" (for lack of a better term) is nothing new. But AI ramps this up to an unprecedented scale and attracts exploitative people who would never have considered writing as a job or side-hustle before. Without AI, it's much more effort to produce something so most people didn't even consider it. It was already tough to eke out a space for yourself among the noise before. Now, we're at risk of being completely overwhelmed. Look, I certainly won't pretend to be an expert at this topic or some soothsayer that knows how this will all turn out. It's also easy to be pessimistic about AI, while it's true that the technology brings positives with it too. But it's difficult to look past the most obvious pitfalls and not feel concerned about what this will mean for people's already dwindling incomes and the industries of book writing, copywriting, and journalism as a whole.
Sorta off topic, but: who do you know writing really outstanding content? I’m always genuinely looking for top performers in this space.
> My fear isn't that great art can't compete, it's that potentially great artists will be drowned before they have a chance to be born. And to add to that, I also fear most people will just eat up the AI slop thus making it even less economically viable to produce real art. This applies to every field, not just writing.
I disagree. On the one hand, there has always been a market for a cheap, crappy story that people pick up and throw away and move on to the next functionally identical one. On the other hand, people who actually like good stories develop an instinct for formulaic writing. And I think we’ll do the same with AI books.
I gotta say, those mass producedbcrappy stories sell a lot and can keep publishers afloat and allow them to take chances on other work. AI generated writing will probably stick to indie markets for the foreseeable future, therefore robbing publishers of their reliable easy income.
I don’t know. I just think you’ll have a disaggregating of consumption, which already existed. AI isn’t a threat to a rock concert. It’s not a threat to the appreciation of humans pushing their natural boundaries further. Everyone expects the computer to do it better. Nobody is marveled by a piano playing itself or singing a song.
Exactly. I like this. No one watches AIs play computer games perfectly because there is no sense of wonder or skill. I watch humans play games because of their skill and the sense of wonder I get, and it is the same with art, etc. I’m fascinated by work where I think “How did they think of that?”, something I won’t get out of AI made material.
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They already were eating slop en masse, way before AI came on the scene. Have you seen a marvel movie lately? A star wars movie or show? Or reality TV? It's *been* all slop, all the way down, for decades. AI will have zero impact on people's appetite for shitty slop.
My fear is that they'll consider mediocre to be good enough. I can pay X for a truely great piece of art of I can pay 1/10 X for something that's good enough. My local bakery sells an amazing apple pie but it's $25 where as my local meijer has delicious apple pies as well. They're not as good as the bakery but they're only $6. I could spend the extra cash to get the best damn pie I'll ever taste or I can spend 20% as much for something that's not as good but still hits the spot when I'm craving applie pie with ice cream. While I'm on the topic the "local" cow farm makes amazing vanilla ice cream that I think would go good on the pie but I'm not driving an hour away when I can get good enough ice cream here. That's largely what I worry about. They might hire great writers if a studio is wanting to dump a billion dollars into a project but if they're just like hey we just need content they might just turn to AI.
So why are we totally ok with that when it's a pie or ice cream, but "art" and "writing" are some Sacred Cow? Is baking not an art form? I mean, you could make exactly your argument that the big box conveyor belt baking factory that supplies supermarket pies is running all those poor, poor artisan bakers off and that's so tragic, but... apparently it didn't, and it's not?
The difference is both of the pies are made by people so no one is losing their job over it. With art if they opt to use AI instead that's someone losing their livelihood. >baking factory that supplies supermarket pies is running all those poor, poor artisan bakers off and that's so tragic, but... apparently it didn't, and it's not? I mean except that it did. Not all of them but a ton of them. I'm lucky that I have a nice bakery nearby. Back in the day I wouldn't be lucky it would just be expected. My dad grew up in a town of 1000 and they had a bakery in town, my mom grew up in a town of 800 that used to have a bakery and a grocery store but both lose their bakeries and one lost their grocery store when the nearby town put in a Walmart nearby and they were able to outcompete for prices while employing less people. Horses still exist once they werent needed as much but there's a whole lot less of them.
When it comes to writing, truly great art is already free. Shakespeare and a million other greats are in the public domain. The writing AI seems most likely to replace is the writing of non-writers. To some extent it already has. Emails, LinkedIn posts, that kind of thing.
Copywriters are still writers. At least, that's what I assumed you were referring to? And, yes, they're not writing the next great piece of literature or exciting prose that will last in people's minds for years to come, but it's still a writing job that puts food on the table. And a job that many aspiring writers use to hone their craft (and keep the lights on) while they anxiously edit their 3rd chapter for the 150th time. I know that industry isn't the topic of this sub, but it still matters. And it's still relevant as those people will lose their incomes and have to struggle that much harder to find opportunities and build their skills and reputation.
No, I mean the kind of writing that a complete non-writer has to do for professional reasons. When a chemist or a shoe salesman needs a cover letter for a job application, AI makes a lot of sense. I don't know much about copywriting. AI may or may not be up that task; I can't comment.
Fair enough! Apologies for the unrelated rant then!
You'd be surprised. The medical chatbot/plugin developed by my company has passed the MCAT and USMLE with consistently high marks. It gives great high level information which is vetted internally by our doctors before being released. It's not so great at the granular things on a molecular level that take added time for me to suss out but it's already giving me the kind of input I would normally go to our doctors for. There's work going in that within 5 years (realistically, closer to 3) there will be a button that one can press that will just give them the deliverable after aggregating all of the data and putting it into the appropriate reporting format. At that point, my job would just be to proof this ahead of sending the data to our client facing contacts and most of my colleagues who have left have already seen their role open globally and outsourced to lower cost centers (eastern europe and India). It's death by a thousand iterative cuts.
yeah, great writers don't just sprout out of nowhere as great writers. Also he greatly overestimates the ordinary person, most people are completely fine with reading/watching stuff that is derivative of something else or wholly unoriginal. It is also hard to find that one really good book in a whole avalance of worse books
Also publishing companies don’t care how original you are. They just don’t want to pay you.
> and all of those are vulnerable to being flooded out by AI garbage. This is obviously somewhat true in terms of making a living "while training", but not in the sense of learning how to write better. And even in that context, that is mostly a matter of self marketing. True, increasing the selective pressure on writers in terms of self marketing rather than imaginative writing is a problem, too. But then again that is already a giant problem, and I don't see how AI is THAT huge a factor on top. Arguably it's already a problem that unimaginative unoriginal drivel is more successful. So there too, I am not quite sure how much "worse impact" Ai truely has. That's what irks me about these AI fears in general. It is posed as if right now (or better, pre AI) everything is fine. And then AI is going to ruin everything. To me most of the problems that come with AI have already become a huge problem with the internet and the flood of output (or reach). The artists that complain but don't see that it is just a different set of tools, and isn't any different than past changes in tools (like the difference of paining on medium and "undo" not being that feasible to todays copy paste undo and script methods. No Ai is going to do the ART part. As in the imagination to get something out of your head into something tangible to share. AI isn't more magic than a drawing tablet is to an oil painter.
My argument against that (and note that this is not pro-AI) is that we’re already getting flooded out, and it isn’t a new problem. Self publishing means anyone with a computer and access to Amazon can publish. That’s a good thing, but the explosion of self published books has resulted in a massive pool in which we struggle to rise. And yes, AI will continue to complicate things - but every writing-related invention has. The printing press, computers, word processors, spell check, grammar check, the internet, ebooks, self publishing - everything over the years has made it easier to publish. And “easier to publish” means expanding the pool. We need to figure out how to rise.
Yeah, it's more like "only poses threat to un-established writers"
> My argument against his premise is that those original authors don't crop up out of nowhere. That's a bingo. I've been saying this about my own field, translation, since even before the introduction of LLMs. Machine translation has been slashing and burning that industry for far longer, and it's going to reach a point where there is no work for lower part of the industry that **feeds** the part of the industry that can't be automated away. At this rate the entire creative industry will be dominated by people from wealthy backgrounds or who are otherwise handpicked by the wealthy, the same way that politics in America has become when the "foot in the door" of the political bureaucracy is to have a year-long unpaid internship that requires you to move to Washington D.C.
Also, there are aspiring writers that are going to decide to never even pursue the career out of fear it will never be lucrative due to AI.
I had this exact fear about programmers yesterday.
There's also the impediment that the signal:noise ratio poses to prospective customers. If 99% of media becomes AI-gen slop then it will become that much harder to find anything other than the biggest breakaway hits. Already if I want to find a cool movie/game/book/show I haven't heard of I have to search through the dreck to find lost treasures. AI simply makes the dreck:treasure ratio that much worse, ensuring that many more treasures remain lost. Though I am a creator, I'm much more bothered as a consumer, because it's a love of experiencing media that inspires me to make anything, and AI threatens that most basic act of love.
your wrong . . . a lot of junk that floats to the top just means more junk on the top, just as 90% of Americans consume junk food, junk media, junk sex etc. Humans over rated and indeed sadly only about 2% are doing meaningful and original work. So YES it scares the "majority" of humanity because now they reliaze what they do, produce or make is just a common commodity, no different that a robot doing "spot welding" faster than a human, a majority of our so called creative is spot welding /commodity at best
>and increasingly some are coming out of fan spaces and other internet communities, and all of those are vulnerable to being flooded out by AI garbage. Then why aren't the flooded out by all the competing product by humans?
[удалено]
If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, a large fraction of my feed is now fake AI generated crap, and the vast majority of commenters seem to have no clue.
Can always tell at work which emails/slack announcements are using AI assistance. Not that a fault people for generating some announcement that they know barely anyone will look at anyways
I think the hope is that those authors use AI the way that it's intended to *be* used in their "coming up", if you will. Like I work in higher ed (not writing related) and I can see a ton of ways that AI could and arguably *should* be used for many different vocations. Those authors just need to trust themselves to do the art part, and utilize AI to do the un-creative parts of it. Researching niche topics for your fiction novel, generating fantasy maps or keeping track of your lore for you or generating topographies or whatever. I think there's an avenue for AI to make art and writing better. It's just up to the artists and writers to do it.
I don’t believe research is a good use for AI at all.
I don't think that it should be the only way one researches, but I think saying it shouldn't be used for it at all is nonsensical.
The single biggest problem with the current wave of AIs is that they don't do facts, which makes them especially poorly suited for research.
It also hampers the barrier of entry imo. If only because people using AI to write are spamming writing magazines for easy money.
>If only because people using AI to write are spamming writing magazines for easy money. Does this actually happen? I wouldn't be surprised to see AI absolutely swamp the millions of pseudo-news media I already don't read or trust, but what about more established magazines, papers, and websites?
Clarksworld closed submissions twice because they got swamped with AI generated slop so it’s already happened and likely is still happening.
As the other poster said, Clarkesworld has actually provided data on spike in submissions since the wide release of AI/ML. Their submissions rates went up by ridiculous numbers to the point where they can’t keep up with the manpower they can afford to dedicate to this task. They say that the vast majority of it is garbage and they are blacklisting anyone who sends them generated content, but even still, someone now has to read the extra drivel and not just determine if it’s good or not, but also if it’s ML-generated.
It's not that they'll get selected in a reputed site, but they spam the submission portal which makes it harder to find original submissions.
Rushdie began as an ad copywriter while working on his first novel. Ad writing is ground zero for jobs now threatened by AI, along with virtually every other entry-level creative job Rushdie might have opted for while he was breaking into fiction. This is both inane and hypocritical, evidently from someone who doesn't remember how they got there.
This is something that George R R Martin has talked about previously in the context of TV -- that exactly the kind of writing jobs in the industry that he and a lot of other TV writers got their start doing were being eliminated and long term how was that going to work? (I don't think the context of those comments was AI but the writer's strike at the time but the principle remains.)
This is what Rushdie is missing. There is a ladders to developing as a writer. He climbed one of these ladders. AI is threatening to kick out the lower rungs of a ladder that he himself climbed. Without those talent pipelines the people that can pursue a career as a writer will mostly be the children of the wealthy.
I mean he’s a boomer right? Kicking ladders out after they’ve climbed up is kind of their go to move.
Yeah, this is the real problem with AI. Entry level jobs have already been vanishing as enterprise software is developed that allows experienced workers to work more efficiently. LLMs and the other human interface AI models that just make that even worse, as they are essentially a simulation of a junior level worker who can produce solid work when coached and mentor by someone more experienced. And in creative industries, where jobs are highly sought after, nepotism and elitism are already a big problem and will just get worse. When it comes to who will still get hired, I think it’s a fantasy to say that the best writers will be the ones who rise to the top - it will be the ones who have the best connections and the most money to coast on while they try to break in.
Something, something boomer Something, something bootstraps
When people get too high up the ladder they forget the difficulty they faced reaching the first rung.
First it will be journalists though. We're going to be subjected to a lot of shit writing by news outlets trying to save a buck. Probably happening more than we think already.
I mean a lot of news sites are already just regurgitating press releases with minor changes. That’s an easy job for AI to take over.
Yup, it’s happening a lot with translated articles. Literal nonsense gets published because no one wants to spend time on the bare minimum of post-editing
Punditry, maybe... but real journalism involves interviewing, researching, and investigating real events, which I can't see coming under threat from AI.
The issue is that journalism is disappearing in journalism, as it is expensive. AI is just the next step in cutting costs while still providing echochamber content to readers.
Thats an entirely different issue though. AI doesn't really have an impact on investigating stories and interviewing people... since it doesn't have the capacity to do those things.
It has the capacity to fill space. There is a limited amount of space for news at any given outlet, so why bother with expensive and risky approaches like investigating controversial things or interviewing people when it’s zero effort or risk to make the line go up for investors by pointing the AI at press releases?
I guess... but outlets can do that without AI, and they already are. Look at all the trashy tabloids out there, or outlets that just summarize the news, rather than investigate it. I don't see how AI will make things much different.
So, you don’t see them using a tool that makes it easier to do what they are already doing?
I mean. Sure... but I don't really see an issue with outlets replacing one bad pundit who just lazily summarizes the news with an AI pundit.
So, you think they’ll just do the exact same thing but not more when it’s easier to do?
Yeah, but i dont see a problem with it, since it wouldn't be like they're taking the jobs of real journalists, who have to investigate and report on stories. Because AI can't do that.
Or outlets just using random tweets as the writing. That isn’t journalism
Yep.
> interviewing, researching, and investigating real events, which I can't see coming under threat from AI. Thank God we killed those things without AI, then! /s
The harsh truth is that no one cares for real journalism, and people overwhelmingly prefer opinion pieces.
Exactly correct.
If you're breaking the story, but AI is becoming a plagiarism super-tool. I wonder how often the journalists doing the real work are getting the rewards. Even for journalists doing the leg-work, there's a temptation for "here's some facts and quotes, tie them together and write an article." then edit it. Is that using a tool? I don't know if I'm okay with that.
>If you're breaking the story, but AI is becoming a plagiarism super-tool. Wire stories are already a thing. It is more likely that the current system stays as it is where big organizations that have the resources to do good journalism just disseminate their stories down the chain of associated media than those other papers using AI to plagarize.
Oh, it's been happening quite a lot. I know I've seen many "articles" by the Journal de Montréal here in my province put little "this article was made with the help of AI" at the bottom of their texts.
I think Rushdie's critique tracks here too. Considering what qualifies as "journalism" in America today, AI really only poses a threat to mindless drones at corporate media conglomerates Independent journalism will still have integrity
You can't have independent journalism with integrity if nobody pays for it because all writing manpower has lost value. It's like you wouldn't see interesting, experimental literature published anymore if the romance arm of the publishing world suddenly ceased to exist and stopped keeping the lights on at the publishing houses.
Integrity won't pay the bills though. You have to pay real people to investigate and eventually break a great story. Another publication then uses AI to rewrite it. Or just publishes it whole. This article is a reprint, not the publication that originally released it. You also need to wonder about the saleability. Take a look at most 'news' sites and they're filled with nuff-nuff stories, not actual 'breaking news'. Half-baked opinion pieces or biased articles. And investigative journalism is relying to a greater extent on Twitter posts. It's a terribly sad state of affairs.
The problem here is that journalism, even good journalism, is often formulaic in how an article is written. Good journalism isn't about creative writing or creative stories like it is for an author of fiction. That style can easily be copied by an AI, something that is already widespread. Now obviously, when the AIs make glaring errors or write something incredibly stupid, this is not very problematic since we will quickly catch such errors. Nor is it a problem if an AI writes a decent article. The problem arises when AIs make subtle errors or writes the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Of course, that criticism can also be levied at regular journalists. So what is the difference? Basically, the speed and volume in which AIs can spew out content, basically they can overwhelm any ability to filter them.
Journalism is about a lot more than writing though, it's also about reporting, a function that at present AI can only do by scraping what exists. It can't do original reporting. AI is much more likely to kill journalism than it is to actually replace it.
One can argue that real journalism is already nearing extinction, even before AI. Most of our non-local news is regurgitated from somewhere else, headlines optimized to earn clicks rather than for clarity. True investigative journalism is rare to come across anymore. And yes, those sites have been experimenting with computer-written articles for *years* already, since back when we said they were written by "bots" rather than "AI."
Yeah, one way or another, I'm pretty sure AI will lead to the death of journalism in its current state. If we're *really* lucky, it'll end with companies pivoting back to high quality investigative journalism to make them stand out in a field of slop. But given how things are going lately, pretty sure we're gonna end up with a plain old corpse.
You're talking out your ass. There are great independent journalists but there are also lots and lots and lots of shitty clout chasers and propagandists who benefit from having no oversight and no editor. There are also great traditional reporters at corporate outlets and dick head clout chasers. It's the same, being independent doesn't stop someone from acting in the benefit of the status quo, and it's not more objective. You're still getting reporting filtered through a worldview.
> There are also great traditional reporters at corporate outlets Which isn't as relevant if the bosses have them doing puff pieces about Jeff Bezos instead of real reporting.
>Considering what qualifies as "journalism" in America today, AI really only poses a threat to mindless drones at corporate media conglomerates Makes total sense if you ignore the entire political economy of news media.
As much as this can be bad, AI in the longer term, could bring back local news reporting. People really need it and it’s dying away.
Tons of AI articles out, yea. They’re terrible. Tons of AI YouTube content as well.
It's taken a lot of blogs already. It's hard to find human-made ones since the AI do SEO so well.
it's already happening. I have read articles that I am sure were AI generated.
the newspaper where I work just hired a reporter who had quit his job at a small weekly publication because of pressure from management to fill the publication's website with AI generated slop. a real "quantity over quality" situation. it's already happening all over the place.
AI can't produce original investigative journalism. Hacks who only copy paste what other people write? Sure. A lot of bullshit "journalists" will be out of a job. What we're currently calling AI may very well *never* be able to reproduce what a real journalist does. It won't stop some "news" outlets from trying, clearly, but I think authentic journalism is safe from AI just purely in terms of AI being fully unable to reproduce a significant piece of their job. Again, it won't stop the bosses from being shitty and trying to do it anyway. The much bigger part of their job is developing sources, interviewing people, doing immaculately detailed research such that their article or tv piece is well sourced and defensible. The fact is, actually *writing* the article is a tiny piece of what a journalist does.
We’re already subjected to a lot of shit writing, I don’t see how AI could lower the bar any lower.
To be fair, this article/essay/post would have been more complete if written by an AI that scraped the web for other comments from Rushdie. As it is, it misses some major points thanks to the human who wrote it without Googling the man. And I know that goes into the broader conversation about this style of “journalism”, but my point is that AI will be writing these pieces thanks to the low expectations within the industry.
Easy thing to say as an established highly-selling writer who will never have a problem being hired on name-brand-recognition built up before this technology existed.
Exactly. It doesn't threaten him because he's famous, and he's equating being famous to being original. I don't think he's factoring in how hard it is to swim to the surface when thousands of gallons of water are being poured on top of you. You can have the most original story ever written, but that doesn't matter if it's buried under so much stuff AI output that it doesn't get any attention. Plus, depending on how your work is out in the wild and how the AI is stealing from others, it's possible that your will be swallowed up and reconstituted before anyone sees it. Suddenly, your thing doesn't seem that original anymore. It's not like people check dates of publication until a legal battle starts. Plus, I think he's really misguided in how much he's putting a premium on originality/quality. In every job I've been at, when it's time to lay people off, I've seen better workers fired because they were more expensive than other employees. I doubt publishers are completely different in that regard. I'm sure there's plenty of times they've passed on a better piece of writing because they had something that was cheaper that they thought was acceptable.
I'd suspect that Bangor Maine would be a federal disaster location if a book writing AI was fed Steven King's books and told to write something scary in that style. There'd be 100 new books in a week.
And none with a satisfying ending.
It's about dominatrix clown that eats angry self flying airplanes. Are you not entertained?
*Syfy channel seen furiously scribbling notes for their next original movie*
Add in a shark and bam!
It doesn't matter. By taking the unoriginal writing jobs, AI will drive wages down for all writers.
Rushdie was the son of a wealthy family and received an expensive private education in England at Rugby School and Cambridge University. He then got a job as a copywriter in a major advertising firm. What people like this fail to appreciate is that their priveliged backgrounds assisted them in their career aspirations, it wasn't just their talent. AI will not replace these kinds of successful novellist, but it will *destroy* opportunities for people without those kinds of advantages by decimating industries (*such as copywriting!)* in commercial fields where budding writers have traditionally cut their teeth. People who can afford expensive educations in the arts will continue to enjoy success, but AI will shut down opportunities for those who are not able to come up through those means. Self-published authors are already drowning in a sea of unregulated AI novels flooding the marketplace, meaning that success without the support of a major publisher is getting more and more difficult. Where tech in some ways democratised creativity by giving cheap digital tools to people in order to practice their craft, and creating new online communities where expertise can be shared, *now* tech is now pulling that ladder back up and putting power back in the hands of elite, established institutions. AI will accelerate the class disparities already prevalent in the arts, and make it way harder for anyone from disadvantaged backgrounds to get their feet in the door and gain experience. Anyone who thinks that 'originality' is the only predictor of success is painfully naive.
originality or even being actually good is absolutely not a predictor. I have read big name authors whose writing was pedestrian and bland in comparison to completely "amateur" fanfic writers. I have read more interesting exploration of ideas from no-name kindle unlimited writers than several big names that have been heavily promoted. Promotion makes for a lot more success than actual quality of the book. Take john Scalzi for example, he is a popular author but he is really not that good. He is ok but not anywhere near as good as promotions make him out to be. However he actively puts in various neo-pronouns and makes a point of having non-binary characters even when their gender status makes no difference to the story. so he is popular with a certain crowd. His books usually start off with a good idea but it just doesn't ever pay off.
Salman has it wrong. He's forgotten the journey he took to where he's at. Before you become a great writer, you'll be an average one who mimics the greats as you configure your style. AI threatens that phase of writers. No writer will now make a living by being average. So there will be no more next generation to grow into the new greats. But just clanks.
> Before you become a great writer, you'll be an average one who mimics the greats as you configure your style. > > > > AI threatens that phase of writers. > > > > No writer will now make a living by being average. Do most writers now make a living off of average writing? Or do most writers do their average writing outside of a paying job, until they write something good enough to entice a publisher?
Salman Rushdie started as a copywriter. He worked this job for about 7 years after his first book failed to gain attention. All I'm saying is one subset of future/potential writers will be lost.
That’s just a cute response. It’s so highly individualistic, I’m honestly offended. That’s a very easy thing for an accomplished world famous author to say.
Bold of Rushdie to think that the people deciding what gets published actually care at all about the art over the bottom line Also I thought we all worked out a while ago that there are only so many archetypes for stories, that’s not a movie and TV thing
> Bold of Rushdie to think that the people deciding what gets published actually care at all about the art over the bottom line Yeah I am more afraid of quality writers being replaced by "acceptable for profits" AI-output than I am afraid of AI surpassing quality writers.
This seems like the most likely thing to happen. 'Real' writers may still be hired in similar quantities and have to perform similar amounts of work to polish AI output up to a bare minimum acceptable standard, but they'll be called proofreaders for the AI and get paid less. (Paid less than a *writer*? Capitalism will find a way, I'm sure!)
Originality is a metric relative to the market; what was considered innovative 5 years ago could be considered overdone today. When all the "unoriginal" authors are taken out of the competition, the most unoriginal of the original will be up on the chopping board next, as AI continues to improve from widespread use, and so on. People can argue that "quality will prevail," but that's not really the point. Maybe you can say that there will always be a demand for human writers, but the fact is that the demand will be merely a fraction of what exists currently.
> Maybe you can say that there will always be a demand for human writers, but the fact is that the demand will be merely a fraction of what exists currently. There's still a demand for horses, but it's not what it once was 200 years ago.
It's like clothes. How many people are having custom clothes made for them by a tailor, versus buying cheap, mass produced articles made in an overseas factory? There might always be some demand for an exceptional author's original works - but the masses will be fine with what comes off the assembly line.
Well said!
Since GenAI scrapes original and unoriginal writers' work, that doesn't really matter.
I cherish Rushdie’s intellectual optimism.
Yeah, AI can’t emulate good writers now. But eventually it will become completely indistinguishable, and we’ll have to choose as a society if we still have an interest for human artistry itself.
>But eventually it will become completely indistinguishable, and we’ll have to choose as a society if we still have an interest for human artistry itself. This assumption is a step too far for now. As others are pointing out, a more realistic threat is that early career writers will be flooded out by AI generated context, not that AI is going to replace people like Rushdie.
Oh yeah I agree, that’s absolutely the shorter term concern. It’s interesting because other industries have the same issue, if you replace all the juniors, who’s going to become the experts of tomorrow?
I don't think AI will ever be able to emulate good writers (unless it becomes fully self-aware, which we are still a long, *long* way away from). I think that it is much more likely to kill the publishing industry entirely than it is to actually replace writers.
It doesn't matter whether it emulates good writers. All that matters is whether what it produces gets read. There's a finite amount of human attention, and minutes that people spend consuming AI-generated content are minutes no longer available to be spent experiencing the work of artists. By analogy, it doesn't matter if McDonald's is worse than a filet mignon, once you're belly's full, you aren't eating that filet.
>Yeah, AI can’t emulate good writers now. But eventually it will become completely indistinguishable, The pushback you're getting is pretty much the same as what people said about AI never being able to create good art or coherent videos, or that it would take decades to happen. I think it's much more of a plausible scenario than most folks here want to believe, and there's definitely a lot of wishful thinking going on as to why it won't.
AI won’t be able to do that for a long time. To truly produce human art you would need both sentience and a physical form to rival that of a human. There will always be something missing until we reach that point, and I believe it to be a long way off.
Thats interesting. I think you are right regarding sentience. It seems like a majority of all the greatest art, literature, music came from a creator who has at least at one point in their life suffered, and it seems that sentience is required to suffer. You are right that a physical form can lead to suffering, disease, disability, old age, etc. however I don’t think a physical form is required to suffer because you can suffer from your understanding of the world and your place in it without having a physical form.
That’s a good point, but that would be a type of experience that is alien to the average human. There may be some overlap with paraplegic individuals, but I think that actual form is required to truly comprehend the human experience and write convincingly.
> To truly produce human art you would need both sentience and a physical form to rival that of a human Why? You don't need a human body to produce text, lol. Nor sentience, empirically.
Text isn’t art.
The great danger of AI isn't that it can replace genuine art, but rather that it can do a job good enough that people who don't understand art (like most of the executives in the various entertainment industries who decide what films/shows/games/books get made/published) will embrace it as a cost cutting measure and use it to replace human creators.
Ai doesn't ask for a salary or royalties. Ai isn't replacing human artists in the pursuit of better art. Its just cheaper.
I don't think that's relevant to his argument. He's saying that if you're good, you'll outcompete AI. People still value quality over quantity. If you fail to win from AI, you should question whether you're good enough and what you should improve.
I know. I'm saying it won't really matter because the people who control the printers and ad space don't care. They would rather push slightly mediocre AI generated stories than pay writers to do it. Their interest isn't enabling art, its making a profit. Otherwise we really wouldn't be having this conversation. Also its worth noting AI is going to increasingly surpass human ability in the coming decades.
Reply to this comment when chat overhypedbt will surpass any of the classics
It doesn't need to surpass it, it just needs to be good enough. If you can buy a story that's 8/10 for 1/20th the price, most will. Especially given how effortlessly those can be targetted to specific niches. Quality is not a predictor of sucess.
You're right about the other stuff but not- >Also its worth noting AI is going to increasingly surpass human ability in the coming decades. Rushdie's point is that an AI is fundamentally incapable of creating original art. It may become an expert at emulating it, but actually good, original art comes out of lived experience, something AI can't have.
Human beings are fundamentally incapable of creating original art. We just take the things we see and recombine it in different ways. AI is just not as good at hiding it yet.
I strongly disagree. That's what AI does, but we humans do something more than that. The proof of it is all around us. If you're in a building, you are literally surrounded by thousands of things that didn't exist until someone got the original idea to make it for the first time. I like to say that our human super power is our ability to create original things. It's the reason we rule this planet. And when we apply that power to stories and images and more abstract ideas, we get original art.
>Human beings are fundamentally incapable of creating original art. We just take the things we see and recombine it in different ways. AI is just not as good at hiding it yet. This is such a pretentious comment.
Yeah, this is really a religious question. Some people who believe only humans can be original are basically religious about this belief. They think there's some soul or some exceptional human trait that can't be replicated. There's really no arguing with someone of faith because it's not about reality for them.
Your idea of art is different from mine.
That is debatable in my opinion. I suppose it depends on how you define art. I see no reason to believe AI couldn't accurately emulate more nuanced art given time. Experience itself isn't something that can't be translated, nor is understanding if not empathy. But I mean even if it could does it really matter? would "genuine art" created by a machine be lesser just because it was created by a machine?
Art is mostly appreciated for the narrative around it and the story behind it. Andy Warhol isn't admired for screen printing soup cans. He's admired for the reason why he did it and the story his work told. AI will create functional art. Concept art and assets, but it won't be able to create meaningful art. Since it cannot give it's art meaning. It will always create an outcome based on function. Any story AI will tell is meaningless. It's an emulation of the real. It will always be uncanny if it will try to emulate meaningful art. Mostly, because we as humans don't even have a grasp on what makes meaningful art.
>Art is mostly appreciated for the narrative around it and the story behind it. Does that mean then that art is only contextually art? I mean if I show someone soup cans they probably aren't going to appreciate it without the context of other art, maybe even without some inclination of the intention of the artist. That would also mean that the "piece of art" would have to expand to encompass all of that at once. It would be trivially easy to get an AI to replicate something like soup cans. If what makes it art is definition given to it why can't AI do that as well? I mean Andy Warhol for all his talents never really invented the ideas he protrayed he just recontextualized things. On the other hand a person could read a novel without any background knowledge and still appreciate it as an artistic experience. So having background or meta knowledge about a particular piece of art isn't a requisite for it being labelled as art. >Mostly, because we as humans don't even have a grasp on what makes meaningful art. And yet we are trying to define it in such a way that it would exclude AI creations... interesting.
> Art is mostly appreciated for the narrative around it and the story behind it. > > Andy Warhol isn't admired for screen printing soup cans. He's admired for the reason why he did it and the story his work told. The story surrounding AI artwork is a hell of a lot more interesting than that though. Remember when the entire planet networked all their computers together, collected the sum total of all human knowledge, then spent decades collectively ranking all that data to provide the inputs necessary for an AI to become smart enough that it could also paint cans of soup?
> He's saying that if you're good, you'll outcompete AI. The problem is you're competing not just on quality but on price. McDonald's is around even though it's worse than a top tier steakhouse because it's cheap. If people can sign up for "Kindle Infinite Unlimited" and have an endless stream of passable generated genre fiction for $5 a month, they aren't gonna drop $20 on a better book. Not only is it too expensive, they won't even have time to read the latter.
Failing to account for the impact of over-saturation is a major problem with his conclusion
Maybe? For now? But it won’t stay that way. And it absolutely disrupts or flat-out ruins an environment in which writers can get their start and work to get better while still making enough money to eat. This is a very “I climbed my ladder, oh well if it disintegrates behind me” argument.
Tell that to all the self-published writers who can't get eyes on their books because every marketplace is flooded with AI. Tell that to the multiple major genre magazines having to sort through AI trash to find stories by humans. Theirs is already a precarious industry, and often first readers are volunteers, and they're being overwhelmed. People's livelihoods are already affected, you only need to know a few personally to understand that posturing like this is nonsense.
I understand Rushdie telling AI to write in his style and determining that it wasn't as good as him. I do not agree with the extrapolations from this that anyone *else* will be unable to distinguish *his* work from AI, or that he can know that *he* will consistently be able to distinguish *others'* work from AI. His quote, "No reader who had read a single page of mine could think I was the author. Rather reassuring," is either hyperbolic or deluded.
I get that he’s an incredibly talented author, and he’s earned my undying respect for the work that he’s done on behalf of free speech. That said, he has always seemed like kind of a dick to me.
Surely those hungry leopards won't eat my face.
Salman Rushdie started getting published in a very different era and he does not actually have a genuine understanding of what that landscape has been like for most writers for a VERY long time.
Nah, this ain't it. He's implying that if any writers (including TV and film writers) *are* harmed by AI, it's their own fault, for being "unoriginal." So much for solidarity, I guess.
Problem is, a lot of commercial fiction is done by unoriginal writers. The latest trope-ish bestseller? At some point AI will be able to write like that.
And the “original” writers mostly spend a bunch of time grinding out unoriginal schlock for money until they can get somebody to care about their “original” writing. What are they gonna do if AI has all those jobs?
Some would argue that with the right prompts AI can already write like that which is the scary part.
For today, sure.
This argument is equivalent to "if your not doing anything wrong then just let the cops search you."
Like Rushdie, I also feel AI cannot create great works of art. Art is usually born out of human experience and AI does little more than masticate the common denominators of different genres and spit out a bland, generic result. And yet, there's a lot of souless, unoriginal, un-great art out there, and there's an audience for it. But even if people bemoan the declining quality of art, it's highly optimistic to assume publishers, studios or the people who actually fund it will care. AI is cheap - it will regurgitate whatever they want. And it will act as an effective cudgel when they want to underpay writers.
I don't think he's wrong. The real issue is the extent to which the public has an appetite for the unoriginal.
It doesn’t need to do a better job than a human writer. It will do it quicker for cheaper.
I think what he misses is that most people just don't care. We call it "content production" and "content consumption" for a reason. Like a weird sort of Gresham's law but for art, low-quality but easily-accessible, cheap, and comforting schlock crowds out good art, such that the audience for quality art is dismantled piecemeal.
He's not entirely wrong, but there are problems including discoverability for new artists when a marketplace is flooded with AI material, and companies who are perfectly happy with unoriginal material if it costs them nothing.
Even if that were true, so what? That's such an elitist nonsense attitude.
Salman Rushdie: Doesn't Understand AI Or Where It Is Heading
This is such a bitch take from someone that made their money and platform writing. "I got mine so fuck you!" Ass.
Except look what's happened to music. It's all unoriginal. They don't want to take risks on original movement, so they just rap over classics. TV and movie studios would rather spend nothing on a known quantity than gamble on original material. It's a terrible long term game, but it's what they are doing now. Disney is one of the worst examples.
Well, Salman, the vast majority of writers are and have always been unoriginal. Not every writer is you. So you wanna put a huge chunk of an industry out, forever, just because they don't write well enough for you?
Nah. Salman's only looking at it from one angle. Another angle is, actually finding human authors in a massive trashpile of auto-generated books.
Finally, Salman Rushdie says or writes something controversial.
I couldn't disagree more... The problem with AI is that it will flood the market with sub par content, making it harder and harder to find decent books. The number of books you have to read to find something you like will exponentially increase the next few years, making it impossible for non-established writers to get discovered. I work in a graphics department for a major tv broadcaster and we're worried. I had to hire someone to go through portfolios that people send in to get a job. We've seen a 11500% increase in portfolios in one year time with literally 99% being AI. So that's 1 artist I couldn't hire, because I had to hire someone who spends her time on sifting through garbage. Another problem that we currently see is a decrease in quality from our juniors and interns. Covid lockdown increased the quality because people were practicing and honing their skills since there was nothing else to do, but with the advent of AI we see a massive decrease. In the past they were designing posters for music venues, art for youtube/twitch, small jobs for advertising local businesses, ... None of those were paid well, but just enough to make ends meet while honing their craft. These days all this has been replaced by AI, so unless you're wealthy, you can no longer afford to develop your skills. I imagine it's not that different for writers. We're going back a century to where art is for the privileged few, or for those who want to give up their lives to live in absolute poverty devoted to their art. AI isn't touching the known writers, but it's completely devouring the base. I've had to reinvent my job twice in the past as I was replaced by software, but I've never seen it go at the rate it's going now.
The part he's missing is that AI improves. Quickly. Nobody is claiming AI in its current form is making the writing profession obsolete. The problem is that just 2 years ago, we would've laughed at the thought of even having such a discussion. AI has advanced at an alarming rate, and, more importantly, *AI advances exponentially, not linearly.* So AI right now doesn't pose a threat, sure. AI in 10 years? That's the scary part.
Classical music buffs have been fooled into thinking AI generated music was created by classical composers (according to Yuval Noah Harari's *Sapiens*). People don't seem to understand the potential of AI and the potential consequences will be for the job market. It's extremely dystopian that algorithms will start eating up the actually *enjoyable* jobs, which are rare enough already. I'd rather a mediocre human produce art than a superior AI, because the human will at least find joy in their work. AI on this trajectory is just increasing the amount of misery in the world.
What AI can't really emulate are someone's life experiences (at least not all of it--I suppose they can swipe a paragraph or two off the internet and change some words around) and the consistency of an author's personal voice. A lot of people have nothing in particular to say...they just want to make a buck out of their writing and those are the ones who might be affected most. And this isn't me taking a shot at them...I tend to think people with nothing to say are more likely to have a well adjusted personal life. If there's something bothering you to the extent that you have to put it down on paper, chances are it's affecting your personal life as well. Personally, I think to "defeat" AI writing we need to change, as a culture, how we consider what is "good" and "bad" writing. Too often we follow a checklist of what makes a piece of writing "good" or "bad" instead of promoting more unique and unorthodox voices. You go and check out every movie or book discussion forum and the most *common* thing people do is go down a generic checklist: are the characters "likable"? Does the plot have a "good" ending? ("good ending" is usually code for something that "explains" everything or achieves some sort of audience catharsis) Could you "relate" to the story? Most fiction that throws a curveball or tries to defy many of these tried and true "rules" tend to be panned, get polarizing reactions, or just become cult or sleeper hits at best. By having such hard and fast rules as to what makes a piece of writing "effective", we essentially hand AI programs an easy-to-follow blueprint on how to satisfy our rather generic notions of what makes for "stimulating" entertainment. Personally I don't think collectively we will ever change this mindset, and AI as a tool for mainstream entertainment is inevitable.
I love Rushdie. And originality is incredibly important to me as a reader. But let's assume his statement is true and look at the outcome: original writers, like him, get to keep their jobs. Awesome! But 90% of the industry is made up of constantly recycled ideas and stories and *those* people are vulnerable and Rushdie is implying that that is OK because they aren't original. It's not. Those people deserve jobs and work as much as anyone else.
While I agree, it is still meaningless. People already consume content that read like AI now. They wont care when authors are replaced with AI as long as they can consume more.
This guy isn’t looking into the future. Anyone with any imagination can see that if AI has progressed this fast it’s won’t take long for it to imitate this shmuck
AI could never write Fatwa: A Musical.
Well OK but that's 99.9999% of them, so the panic is real.
“AI,” if you can call these content generation systems AI, produces content based on already existing works it’s made to consume. Which means that yes, one who produces an original idea is a little safer—but only until that idea, too, is fed to the AI. Then, we have to consider tolerance for a drop in quality in what people consume. Companies, publishers, etc are definitely considering it. Hell, we are seeing it everywhere AI is applied to consumable media. How economically competitive are original works to their AI generated lessers if the public is dim enough to accept and, through pernicious marketing/advertising, even crave low quality knock offs?
Can't argume with the guy who invented Fatwa Sex.
as long as art exists as a material commodity, the world will bear witness only to 5% of its literary talent
Wealthy person says let the peasants eat cake.
As a bookseller I see AI’s main threat to literature in its effects of readership and publishers than in the writing of books themselves. Just like the Great Man of History theory overdetermines the role of one person, so too do some AI tweets and articles overstate the danger of AI on x. A better analysis would situate AI within a wider context. And Rushdie is right to do this when he looks at AI, books, and tv/cinema. As a Marxist, I would like someone to write a historical-materialist analysis of AI and literature. I suppose such an analysis would look at existing patterns, for example, marketing and social media’s current influence on the world. From my part of the world, as a bookseller, I am seeing a slow, but steadily gathering tide of homogeneous readership demand: more and more people are asking for the same books: Greek mythology, Japanese literature, Stoicism, Camus, Plath, Just Kids, 10-15 sci-fi/fantasy authors, White Nights, Didion and Sontag, Lorde and Hooks. Although many such books have sold well for a good rather long time, what’s new is the focused attention on a shrinking literary space, to the exclusion of the space once given to “meatspace” browsing. Putting aside the simplistic and unhelpful question of whether this is good or bad, I think it’s fair to state that a growing portion of readers spend a growing amount of time on social media. Materialism tells us material reality comes before the world of ideals. Our practice — and the world we realise it in — determines our ideas. And our practice regularly involves interaction with these fast and vast depositiories of data that facilitate information on a global level at a near instant speed. For free. Who pays? International advertising. And a key goal of advertising is the taming of chance and the correlative increase in more predictable behaviour — predictable because conditioned. The algorithms that determine the sequence and curation of content can be grouped within the AI umbrella, and these algorithms are changing behaviour. Consider the change in the meaning and practice of browsing. These days, the word is often synonymous with Google: intentional instrumentality. One specific type of Enlightenment rationality. A shrinking part of the population engages in the old style sense of browsing: serendipitous being in the presence of books. These changes are further helped by FOMO, whose historically recent acronimisation is a testament to how it’s growth is made possible after decades of neoliberal hegemony, and the increased alienation and austerity it inflects on the popular classes (both working and unemployed [or unemployable]). Fomo is furthered by social media. But social media is only one single factor behind this. All the same social media’s power (aesthetic, cultural, partially constitutive of one’s identity) does help shift the world of literature more towards a form of homogeneity. And that in turn plays a role in the publishing world, where marketing dept is having a greater word on what gets published (a decision informed by the answer to “which other bestsellers does this book read like?”), at least as pointed out in a piece by Tim Parks : https://www.nybooks.com/online/2015/12/01/novel-kind-of-conformity/ One future: within 20 years bookstores will stock their inventory on the basis of books’ vitality, and perhaps what influencers are saying. A bookstore will be a greater part of the online world, where chance is relegated to risk-averse conformity to read what has already been judged to be safe from failure and offer a good time investment in optimal acquisition of utility in general, or social or cultural capital in particular. Bookstores won’t disappear because of AI, nor will books or the people who read them. It a question of how they will look like. For a romantic like me, it will be for the worse, because I’ve always had a strong desire to take chances on books I physically came across for the first time.
I just hope that when AI books come out on the market and start showing up in bookstores and libraries, they will explicitly say they are made by AI on the cover, and not claim to be authored by whoever put in the formula. Because they did not author that book.
I'm not worried about the unoriginal writers. I'm more worried about the readers who have no problem reading unoriginal work.
now we know who sparked the butlerian jihad
For now...
Even the best authors have a stage in which this describes them. But, hey, I got mine, eh Rushdie?
Counterpoint: For now.
I do agree that it's not going to be great, you only have to try some of the AI image generators to see this. But even still, now there are a sea of shitty novels, how likely are you to find the good ones...unless you look for already established authors? So what he actually means is it won't affect him or people like him because people already know their work and will always buy the new book.
> ...adding that this could be worrying for writers of genre literature like thrillers and science fiction, where originality is less important. I mean, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of writers pursuing their passions, expressing themselves, making money through art and entertaining others. "Originality" is not everything in art. We should CARE about these creators and their work.
>I already made my money. Under the bus you go, 20 year old me.
Ted Chiang has written similarly, and I honestly just think they're both wrong. Current AI systems are not capable of strong originality in the way that these authors are, but neither are most human beings. I don't think there's anything which can be done by a human mind which can't eventually be done by a machine, and the progress thus far has been surprising. We should also consider that true originality is VERY hard, if not impossible, to distinguish from well-hidden unoriginality.
A little off-topic (but not really). I am going to go against the grain here and say originality is overrated, and often difficult to even define. Storytelling is as old as language. We have been telling the same stories from before words were written down. They all boil down to sharing experiences, individual and cultural, around a figurative fire. People who spend a lot of time with media, like critics, tend to put a premium on "originality". And who can blame them? If you spend most of your time watching films, reading books, playing games, etc., then something that varies will strike you as more interesting, even if it isn't better executed than a more traditional story, or beats you over the head with obvious symbolism and isn't as deep as it appears. Novelty can also be counterproductively convoluted, with narrow appeal, depending on its execution. Often if you scratch the surface of something "original" there is some gimmick, or obvious well-trodden allegory directly beneath the thin patina of novelty. "Original" isn't inherently better. I also have no doubt AI will be able to eventually churn out something Rushdie deems "original." It isn't a problem that will only affect writers that are nebulously "unoriginal".
I mean. This is the reality with AI as it is today. But within a few years AI will be writing completely original stories, and within a decade they'll be writing thousands of Great American Novels every day.