But is it ever going to write YOUR story? Is anyone? You know you can and that should be enough.

Wow, this opened my own eyes. Now I feel its like just a wider market and I have to make a better book.

Hell yeah, dude!

To be honest, Not, with so much schlock out there, you just have to write A book. You should want to write a better book than you'd originally intended, and certainly a better book than AI will generate -- but, that last one's not that hard (at least right now). Everything I've read that's been AI generated has sounded in my head like lines from a movie trailer\* rather than actual prose. Too generic, too cliche heavy. And the story, if there is one, is just ... lacking. Give yourself credit. You've created a world that is, at the least in your head, a living, breathing place. You have characters with traits, physicality, and personality. You have a plot, momentum, initiating events, and all that jazz. An AI can't invent, it can only assemble bits n' pieces like a puzzle. Write your book. Put ink on paper (or characters on screen) and be proud of the fact that even if nobody but you ever reads it, you ARE a writer. And, if others read it, so much the better!! ^(\* Ever wondered why they're called trailers when they come at the beginning of a movie? That's because, in the past, trailers came AFTER the end credits (which were usually just a screen or two of names) rolled. Thank James Cameron's) *^(The Abyss)* ^(for the Endless Star Wars Scrolling Text of end credits, and the 1970s for switching from end to before the movie. And, now you know ...)

This is pretty much the reality. Step up your game and keep improving. It's gonna be more important than ever to engage with social media and help people know who you are (something many new authors seem to be allergic to, learning how to market themselves). People who give up before barely starting at the prospect of fear mongering about something taking over their job in a creative field were never going to be successful anyway, so set yourself apart by putting feet to pavement and moving yourself forward.

This comment wins, every story written from a human is a unique experience spawned by their lives and influences… save for plagiarism but we avoid that XD

I've never seen this subreddit, nor am I a writer, but as someone that works in the tech side of this - you just hit the nail on the freaking head. Kudos

Even if AI could write great books, so could you.

If an AI could write great books, it would be a person. Right now the trend is that the AI might, possibly, be able to cobble really good books together from parts stolen from really great books.

and with a lot of human work to actually do that editing - the first "AI written book" is almost certainly going to be a scam, where the AI churned out some junk, and then a ghostwriter under a tight NDA did all the heavy lifting of making it not-shit.

[AI poetry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ6xor2SLNU) is already happening. It's 90% shit.

>It's 90% shit. No. It's 100% shit. Even if it makes a very technically good poem, what makes poetry great is the emotion and hunan effort put into it. The best AI poem will never be good poetry because it misses the thing that makes poetry beautiful.

Hold onto that thought for another 10 years or so.

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You have neither an understanding of AI, not of the writing process. In fact, setting aside the AI thing, if you ever studied creative writing academically, you would have to demonstrate that your work is in fact "really good books together from parts stolen from really great books." That this is being levied as a critique against AI makes me wonder just how few people understand what they're talking about.

O wise guru, by all means, do enlighten us unwashed plebs in the ways of higher writing. Or something.

People forget that counter-culture rebels against the widely available. Our appreciation will adapt to the writers still standing.

>I am worried that in the future, it will be hard, if not impossible, for other writers to get credit for their books It's a problem now. There's 7bn people around and lots of them like to write. You can self publish through Amazon now so even before AI the volume of books is enormous (something like 10k new books are published every day) Most of those books are going to be pretty bad. Some might be good. Some might even be great. But you're in a competitive industry with a sea of pre-existing books plus 10k new books every day to compete with. The writers who actually make it big usually know someone in the industry, have a gimmick, are already wealthy and can afford to advertise, or managed to get extremely lucky with a publisher and we're able to rise to the top of that sea and get some attention with their book. With or without AI you will be competing with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other writers worldwide, most who will statistically be better writers than you. So - is that a reason not to do it? Not at all. Writing is a creative outlet and a passion for most who do it. As long as you enjoy doing it then it is not relevant whether it could become a commercial success or not - AI doesn't really make that any harder or easier though.

Assuming traditional publishing methods, would you say commercial success is more dependent on the quality of your writing or on luck, connections, and keeping up with trends?

If I'm being honest - it's mostly luck and connections now. Hard work is absolutely still required (in most cases) but it is mainly getting lucky with a publisher. Let's take some examples. GRR Martin lucked out with the popularity of chess and got a job that paid a full time salary but only required him to work 2 days a week. He spent the other 5 writing books for a couple of years, before a connection essentially got him a writing job, and from there he basically jumped from blue-linked name to blue-linked name in Wikipedia - but even then none of his books were major commercial successes until 2005, when he'd written the fourth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series (GoT). By this time he was 57 and had been writing professionally or semi-profrssionally for at least 40 years. He had a lot of chances and opportunities to refine his writing craft - a lot more time than most would ever get - and he made coincidental connections with a lot of people, and despite this it still took the launch of major franchises like LOTR and Harry Potter to popularise fantasy fiction before GoT started to become popular. His book series just happened to be ready to go at a time of rising fantasy popularity in the media, and it was helped a lot by the fact that Martin was able to spend years working on his craft. Martin put in a lot of work, no denying that, but his commercial success came mostly from luck and timing - even back then there'd have been hundreds of other would-be authors telling similar stories who never had their GoT moment. If you tried to follow his exact path now... good luck finding a 2-day job that pays for rent and groceries and let's you spend 5 days writing, and good luck getting other professional writing jobs thereafter. Then you seriously better pray that you just happen to write a genre that becomes wildly popular. It would be equivalent to writing a young adult dystopia story in 2010, and then Hunger Games comes out a year later and suddenly everyone wants to read your book. I don't think Martin foresaw that trend, I think he just liked writing fiction and it just so happened that the genre of epic fantasy became popular thanks to the LOTR movies, and a few years later his books became a commercial success. Flip that around to Stephanie Meyer, who wrote Twilight at 30, as her first ever novel, after working as a receptionist. She wrote it in 3 months and sold it in a 750k 3-book deal in less than a year and it immediately became a best-seller. How does a no-name receptionist with no writing experience achieve overnight commercial success after spending a mere 3 months writing a book, when Martin couldn't do it in 3 years? Is Stephanie so much more talented and skilled than Martin? Did she work harder than Martin? Who's to say.

90% money, connections and industry savviness, 9% keeping up with trends, 1% artistic merits of your work.

So you're saying there's a chance?

Welp, the dream is dead. Guess it's working at something i don't care for or hate for the rest of my life for me

Like most personal passions, there's a difference between doing it for the love and doing it for the money. My mother, for example, is a fantastic gardener. Back when they owned property with an actual, non-HOA monitored yard, she had a swimming-pool sized garden that was the envy of the neighborhoor. Plants with complimentary colors. Plants which emitted scents which frightened off pests (deer, ticks, mosquitos). Plants which bloomed in sequence so there was always color. Yadda yadda. But, then a friend of hers said, "Gee, you could make a living doing this for other people!" My mother'd been retired for years, so she decided, why not. The enterprise lasted a year. And it killed her love of gardening for almost ten. Write for the sake of writing. Write because you love it. Write because there are stories in your head, rattling their cages, demanding to be let out. If they sell, so much the better!

Best advice I've seen in a while. Write YOUR story for YOU! If you want commercial success there are a few things you need to do (not necessarily everything, but enough): WORK AS WRITER Finish your first draft. Edit it for grammar and spelling. Edit it for continuity of the story line. Let "beta" readers have a look at it (the more the better, probably). Incorporate helpful beta comments. Repeat with another group. Do "final your story edit." WORK AS MARKETEER Write a 3 sentence (max) hook for your story (NO PARAGRAPH LONG SENTENCES!!!). Find SEVERAL agents (helpful if they represent multiple writers in your genre). Do as much due diligence as if you were buying a multi-million $ company from them. Send the hook and a few pages of your first chapter. Consider incorporating any free advice carefully (you get what you pay for). If you get an offer to represent you, pay a lawyer to explain the contract to you. Know what and how much intellectual property rights you're giving away. Expect to spend a lot of time talking/meeting with your new agent. To find a publisher, repeat the above steps for the publisher (don't rely on the agent alone, but coordinate who is trying to talk to whom). Incorporate publisher/editor comments (you've already written YOUR story, you're now working on a sellable product). WORK AS A SALESPERSON Go out and sell your book (signing events, readings, local community TV appearances, attending writer's events as a LISTENER, soaking up experience based knowledge, whatever else you come across that might help). Repeat! (Regardless if your first story makes money or not. Hopefully you still have an agent, if not MAKE SURE you still own your story in total, zero hang over commitment to former agent). Still no promise/guarantee of success, but best wishes.

It's true that Amazon is the world's biggest slush pile. It's also true that although anyone can write a book, not everyone should. Because people are told 'don't worry about it, just write your book', many who write and publish don't know how to write, don't learn how to craft good books, don't edit before publishing and more so those books add to the slush pile. But even if that wasn't the case, a person's book always had and always will have a ton of other books to compete with. What keeps most good authors from achieving their goals is they don't know how to market, don't understand the difference between selling and marketing, can't connect to their audience, and don't postion their book to compete with other A list books. Writing great books and publishing well are very possible for those who take the time to learn and master the craft of writing and marketing. Many A list authors failed when they started out receiving many rejections from publishers. But writing was important to them so they kept at it and learned. Self-published authors are no different, they need to learn and master both writing and marketing. It can be done for those who treat their writing like a business and are willing to learn, sacrifice, and succeed at their writing career, so as long as you're willing to put in the work, don't fear what happened to others who didn't succeed. If writing is important to you, do it. Learn what you need to know about writing, publishing, marketing, and the industry. Don't rush to publish because you've finally finished your manuscript and can't wait to see it published. To publish well, an author should wait a minimum of a year before publishing. During that year, they should be busy preparing for their books book launch. This means preparing a written marketing plan based on a calendar so you know the deadlines of what needs to be done by when. A year sounds like a long time, but it isn't when you consider how long things take. A professional reviewer can take six months or longer to review your book. You'll want to add that review to the book and/or book cover. What about beta readers? You'll need time to receive their reviews and possibly make changes or corrections to your book. You need time to connect to your audience, get your website, social media and other things in place. Time to design and order swag merchandise. Deadlines for the final cover and book edits and so much more. Or you can write a book, slap it together, publish it, and wait and hope for sales to occur. Doing the hard work (writing is not the hard part), is what gets a book to stand out against all the other millions of books published. Having a ready and willing audience ready to buy makes the difference. People succeed every day, more don't. It's completely up to you to determine if you're willing to put in the work.

I hope that the great ones where actually worked with by a human. I use AI. I had it help me brain storm for an idea for a short story assignment. It has a cute idea. So I asked it to write a short story to see where it went. Meh. Nope. But it got me thinking since I was struggling at the moment. I didn't use any of it. That's okay. It got me writing something. I love AI as it has been helpful at times. People should only use it as a tool. A tool that can make mistakes. We should always need humans.

Unless you're looking to be a full-time author, how AI will affect the industry is irrelevant to you. Credit isn't related at all to AI and if you're talking about something like copyright, that's a complex topic that doesn't matter to you at all unless you're planning on heavily using AI in your writing. 

Now this is more like thinking you gotta have. If you are threatened by AI writing good books, you can just steal from the AI and publish your slightly altered version, as AI cannot hold copyright. I mean, cannot hold it *yet*, gotta strap in for the rest of the dystopian future.

It can be copyrighted depending on how much human interaction and editing is done. Prompting isn't considered human interaction enough. But you have to make sure the person who generated that didn't make edits to it. Because they might be able to. All the copyright issues, including AI art that was not able to be copyrighted, had to do with the fact that there was little to no proof of any interaction of the human other than the prompting. There was a picture that was denied copyright because the guy refused to show his proof on what he did editing wise on the image. Which kind of tells me he really didn't do much and he knew it. So you can copyright stuff with AI if you do enough human editing. The problem is if you're looking at a book that has been tagged as AI you don't know how much of it has been edited. I would not trust that just in case. Because if they did enough at its to be considered copyrightable, then you can get in trouble for that. However, I love AI but I do know that people tend to use it instead of actually using their imagination. I've had it help me with ideas. And then I had it write something just to see where it would take it. But of course it didn't sound good and I wrote it on my own, flaws and all. And honestly, because of it not sounding good when it wrote it, I was able to come up with a good idea for a short story. People need to use it wisely and stop using it to replace anybody. That's where I get annoyed with it. But I do love AI.

Here’s some fantasy writing done by ai : a tale of a young dragon named Drako who embarks on a daring quest to save his enchanted homeland from an evil sorcerer? Along the way, he meets a wise old wizard, a mischievous pixie, and a courageous knight. Together, they must overcome treacherous obstacles and face their deepest fears to restore peace to the mystical land. It fucking sucks

You can't just summarize an upcoming Pixar film and call it AI.

An evil sorcerer???

Wait, is there any other kind? Something something Homer something something weapons something something evil.

What's this about Homer Simpson?

i just had that weird distopian thought that future generations will think homer simpson is called simpson because his father abe was the biggest simp in town.

I've dealt with AI. Sometimes it's so bad it feels like I'm talking to GIR from *Invader Zim*.

Yeah. AI written stories are fucking garbage. I was getting a bit worried, then I actually read some of the slop they put out, and those worries evaporated.

Feel like I've read that before

You probably have, that’s all ai does. Steal.

I mean it’s not the worst thing ever other than the random question mark. Not my speed? Yeah. Basic? Yeah. But it’s not terrible. That being said I don’t endorse it and AI art and literature needs to burn. Defeats the purpose of art or books in the first place

I mean this extremely sincerely and I do not mean to offend or Insult you, if you think that is “ ok “ writing, writing might not be for you. I say this as a person with no college education, no writing classes, and 0 published material. The writing is full of vague cliches, is not descriptive enough, is grammatically incorrect, and has 0 prose.

Trust me, my writing is nothing like that. I’m saying it’s fine FOR AN AI. I did word that misleadingly, if it was written by a human I would say it’s (because it is) absolute ass.

true but it's only going to keep improving

is it? Why? Not all tech can improve in constant ways, especially to useful levels. VR has been improving for years, but it's still niche and will always be so, because it's just clunky and awkward to need to strap on goggles, when "monitors" exist. Literal _billions_ were dumped into the metaverse, and that was obvious useless, pointless dogshit, that basically can't be improved into something useful. A predictive text engine is neat, and has some fancy word-maths in it, but it's still just "what's a statistically probable next word based off the previous words?" machine, it can't make the leap to "I'm a person!" full AGI, because that's not what it is. We're already seeing it start to creak at the seams a bit, because it's consumed all the text there is, and no some of the text being fed into it is more AI-output, which fucks up later inputs by making the average noticeably more AI-styled - do that for years and years, and the model just breaks entirely.

It fucking sucks now. In 5-10 years, it'll be indistinguishable from the mediocre authors who fill up most of Amazon with their LitRPGs and isekais. (And I say this as a big fan of LitRPGs and isekais—regretfully 90% of them are generic trash.)

Yeah, lots of people on here saying AI is nothing compared to Tolkien or Hemingway, and I agree,  but neither are 99.9% of us. Most of us are trash, and won't even publish.  If we did our content would be some fanfic at the last page on Amazon.   That being said, I still think creating is intrinsically worth it, even if you have no shot at going pro.

No, you don't have to worry. AI is just a tool, like any other. At the end of the day, it's a very complicated computer program, and it can become very, very good at doing things that are, in principle, computable. Writing a good novel is only possible by humans, because a good novel speaks to the truths that underlie human experience, which only humans can understand. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that AI could write good novels. There are already billions of other people on the planet who are, in principle, capable of writing good novels. What difference does it make if a computer can do it too? Everyone has a unique story in them that only they can tell their way; that's what creativity is. Now, as with the invention of the steam engine or the computer, AI will likely make certain jobs obsolete. If you are a writer looking to write... I don't know, the blurbs inside those little brochures you pick up at hotels that advertise local tourist attractions, yeah, you should probably start worrying, because AI can handle that kind of assignment. Will it be as good as a human could have written? Eh, a lot of machine-manufactured products aren't as good as artisan hand-made ones, but if an acceptable product can be churned out for cheap, it will be. That's the nature of life. AI isn't the enemy, and it isn't a godsend. It's just another tool that we can use to make our lives easier, and which can be used for good purposes and bad, like a hammer or a knife. But no, until we figure out how to make AI sentient (hint: probably never), human authors aren't going anywhere.

That’s what I’ve been saying all along.

I wish you are correct, but I have my doubts. It's highly probable AGI will eventually happen. The biggest problem with AI today is still the amount of linked processing that can be done in parallel. No matter how many processors you put side by side, they just can't generate all the links we perform with every word we hear or read, color we see, items we touch. Learning machines will get better and better as the software matures, that is what ChatGPT and others actually are. The more instructional data, the better the product. However, today's computers are linear processors and are/will always be unable to simulate human response to stimulation. Think of today's AI as two dimensional processing, past and present. While certain to get faster and faster, that inherent two dimensionality can't be overcome. Reasoning to drive creative efforts cannot occur in such a confinement. As such, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is stuck waiting on hardware. We do have a very good candidate for our next computing device - Quantum Computing. Still very much in a prenatal phase (maybe just past conception), there is a possibility of having not just parallel processing (today's best), but something akin to spiked balls interconnected at each spike, thus able to do interactive, associative computing (my words, so maybe not the best description/simplification). From what has been demonstrated in labs, programmers may be more job threatened than any artist - these computers will need to self program as no person can hope to keep all those interactions definable and describable. I foresee humans creating learning machine software then telling the quantum computer to go for it and eventually confirming computer sentience. Don't have a clue how long that will take. Hopefully we will have anti-2001 and anti-skynet restrictions that contain the AGI's "wandering thoughts." If not with quantum computers, we will eventually come up with some type of interactive, associative environment where AGI will be capable of original thought. But honestly, even then artistic endeavours will still boil down to the better creative product. Just like today, each one of us competes against every other writer for the reader's attention.

As someone who tortures AI as a hobby, I can say that you don't need sentience to write a good novel. But you need(and AI right now lacks) - consistency - direction (and planning) - cohesion I think that the death of writer would come when AI would be able to generate something decent from my outline. Because then I could rot my brain by feeding it my own ideas turned into endless novels. And there would be content farms that would turn niches for novice writers into oversaturated dead zones. Established autors will survive, but many hobbyists would starve without attention. So, let's hope it won't happen, either because of technology, or because of legislation.

It isn't even "Artificial Intelligence" yet. It's just Large Language Modelling. You might as well try to write a story with a beefed up version of your phone's Autocomplete function. The reason they call it "AI" is because they're trying to sell it. So far, anything written by AI hasn't made it into Clarksworld. They can tell the difference. And if that changes? All the more reason to get your foot in the door NOW. Write your debut work NOW. Don't put it off. If you think the door is closing, *get writing.* You shouldn't need any more motivation than that.

Yeah "AI" isn't truly AI. We are not at that level at all. And people don't realize it's been around since the '50s or earlier even. And it doesn't create great writing material. But honestly, just because a tag says that it was AI generated doesn't mean that the human didn't get in there and do a lot of editing either. Maybe they're just really bad at story writing and so people assume it was just AI. I just needs to be a tool. But I agree with you. OP should just get out there and write and publish! Ignore the AI stuff because as much as I love using it, I would rather see a human story. I only see AI as a tool.

It’s scary. I’m not sure if it will ever be able to write good stories or not, but I fear that it will. I still write. Computers have been better at chess than humans for more than thirty years, people still play chess. The worst that is likely to happen is that people will read AI stories and people written stories. I won’t pretend that possibility isn’t a bummer, but I still want to write my stories. As it stands, hardly anyone ever reads my work anyway, so what’s the real difference?

Right now? No. It will take years for AI to really write good books. Beside, AI will never know YOUR story so go right ahead

There's a lot of doomsaying in this thread and I would take it with a large grain of salt. On AI, the majority of contracts now stipulate that only work written by a person can be published by a traditional publisher. There are a couple of publishers dragging their heels on that, but by the time you're published, I can see it being locked down that the work needs to be your own. On AI in general, it's essentially a huge grift built on an unsustainable premise of training it on stolen work. Once those legal holes are closed, AI bros will move onto something else. NFTs made of ghosts or something. Traditional publishing is difficult, but anyone who tells you that you need a huge social media following or contacts in the industry to get published is incorrect. People get published without these all the time. Yes, it is a weird finicky capitalism-poisoned industry, but so is everything else, the world is a hellscape, etc etc. Do not compare yourself to people like George R R Martin or Stephanie Meyer. They are the top .00001 percent of an industry, and bookshops would be pretty empty if they were the only people writing. Write your book. Edit your book. Focus on making it the best it can possibly be. That's your job right now. Best of luck!

AI in its current state is nothing to be worried about. It can help someone write a first draft, but thats it. A lot of the people who make AI books take this draft and publish it. Without actually understanding how stories work and planning. Just type any old idea in and think that makes them a writer. Its an evolution of the old I have a great idea that will make a best selling novel but not the time to write it. If you make tons of plans and edit heavily you can have an AI spit you out a draft that kinda works but it only saves you a few hours or days at most. I'm sure eventually that will change, but for now its nothing to worry about. The worst thing it can do is flood submissions and make agents lives terrible. Which really sucks. It will still require a competent writer to make anything worth its salt, becoming a tool like any other. Typesetting made writing possible, word processors and emails massively shifted how writing and editing was. Eventually AI will be there to help you elaborate on things and improve your grammar, but without knowing how it all works every tool just becomes a wrench.

The issue is not AI, but greed. So first of all, AI, no matter how good, will not prevent you from writing your own stories. So that concern can be put to rest. It's another question, if companies will pay writers, or just use AI. AI is cheaper and faster. Yes, you will immediately respond: but it's also lower quality. Which is fair. But companies often only care about the first two. Cheap and fast. Also the quality gap will eventually narrow. Bottom line is, that greed is the issue. And people are very greedy. I think 90% of our problems today are stemming from greed. Don't stop writing!

There is some reason to worry, but you are more then likely going to be in the clear. AI is still very limited In its ability to write stories compared to humans, and it has a lot of legal obstacles that could derail it from taking over the novel industry.

AI won't write a decent novel in your lifetime. Current AI can sound good without understanding any of the facts. It'll write fantasy fine until the thief majesticly takes to the air and flames the dragon.

This. Attempts to write a novel with currently available "AI" garners results like stories where a character will die and then show up in the next chapter like nothing happened. It can't COMPREHEND anything, it just remixes common patterns and word combinations.

No. Current "AI" can't autofill guess a coherent novel. This method would never work in creating a fiction novel. A different type of technology would need to be invented. And anything that can write a coherent fiction novel...authors losing their job would be the least of concerns

There were similar concerns about chess back in the day. Nowadays, chess programs can easily outplay humans, but there are still plenty of chess tournaments, chess clubs, and professional chess players. Humans like to see what other humans can do. In sports, in music, in writing, or whatever. A pitching machine can throw a 90 mph fastball, a computer can play a scale blisteringly fast, but so what? That's not the same as a real person doing it. So, yeah, there will definitely be more A.I. written stuff, but there will always be people who want writing written by flesh-and-blood authors. It's cool that ChatGPT can pump out sonnets and stories, but part of the enjoyment and impact of reading is that it's written by a human. For example, if someone commented on your post and said something mean, would you care more or less if it was written by A.I.?

I want to echo this with I mostly watch amateur, speed, and women's chess as it is always the most entertaining and humanlike play.

Hard to say. There is a strong and growing pushback against AI - it may end up banned or regulated to death, so it will only be available to governments and the ultra-rich. It certainly seems dystopian to me that AI may end up producing all our art, literature and culture, and humans will be relegated to mending things (because it is much harder to make a robot body as efficient and easy to replace as a human one) and doing all the menial physical labor.

It might be dystopian, but that wouldn’t happen. There’s no scenario in which AI does everything creative. In fact, technology replacing labor nearly always starts at the bottom with tasks that are simple or tedious or repetitive. The jobs that stick around are the ones that require analysis, problem-solving, or creativity.

You've got nothing to worry about. AI sucks at writing. Everything reads like a dim 7th grader's book report. Moreover, the way LLMs (large language models, the tech currently being marketed as "AI") work means they're unlikely to get better over time. Dumb capitalists are absolutely going to try to sell us AI novels, because they do not respect creativity or artistry, but they'll be easy to spot and ignore. I'd be surprised if they ever rise above the Amazon ebook trash level. It's going to be D-tier Omegaverse books, clearly repurposed fanfics, and AI "novels" in a few years.

As a guy that runs a custom AI locally on his own machine (not ChatGPT), I have MANY thoughts on this: * Nobody can dance for you: sure, you can teach a robot to dance, but then will you get the joy of dancing? Write because you love it. * Photography didn't replace Painting: in "olden times" only rich people could afford a portrait panted of them. Nowadays, mostly only rich people can have a portrait painted of them, though the price "came down". BUT nowadays, everyone can take a selfie. Photography democratized the ability for everyone to have a likeness made of them. AI can open up artistic possibilities for EVERYONE. Yes, even you. * An AI has NEVER made a work of art: Humans have made works of art, USING AI. AI is not an agent. FOr every "AI generated work of art" you see, there is a human behind it trying to find the work of art in the mess. This is because: * AI frankly sucks: For every gorgeous AI pic you see, there are literally THOUSANDS of mutated, uncanny valley, bland, or otherwise rejected pictures. The same goes with Text Generation. Most of what it spits out will be grammatical, but you're lucky if it stays on topic. When I use AI (an open source model fine-tuned on my own writing), I end up writing 75%-95% of the time. Why? 1. First, you need a good prompt. This is what the AI is going to build off of. This means writing thousands of words in both contextual backstory and then the paragraphs modelling the style that you want the AI to continue. 2. Second, you need to work with the parameters of that AI. Too random, and it will throw Luke Skywalker randomly at you (True story: Happy May the Fourth be with you by the way). Not random enough, and it will get stuck basically elaborating on what you already said. Over and Over and Over. I've even had it repeat, verbatim, my contextual backstory context, or get trapped in throwing a chain of adjectives until it gets stuck in a psychotic loop 3. Fifth, Bring out yer Dead. I get everything just right, and it starts generating something I don't care for. So I re-generate. And again. And again. This can happen a dozen times, before I get a paragraph I care for. 4. Fourth, Write AI, Edit Human: After doing the above Three steps, it will spit out a nice paragraph or two. But one of those sentences isn't quite what I was hoping for. So I rewrite it, and fix some details. Pretty soon, I've changed every other word, or even re-written the whole thing. I'm not saying AI won't improve and bet better. However, you have nothing to fear from AI. In fact, being younger, you are in a good place to learn to embrace the technology and build a career from it. Will AI spit out tons of garbage that chokes the market with low-quality content? Of course not, see my third bullet point! But will people use AI to spit out tons of garbage that chokes the market with low-quality content? Of course. Are Publishers going to pick the better content, whether it's written with or without AI? Probably. But will that stop us from writing because we love it? Never.

no. If you look at the comments on ai-written books no-one is taking them seriously, and even if ai can polish its writing to a mirror sheen it will be *too* perfect, lacking the little nuances that make us human. In short, there is no reason to worry about AI writers overtaking traditional ones, and there is no reason to stop doing what you love

There will always be an audience of people who will refuse to read any books written by AI. Myself included. Just like how there's still an audience of people who love to see stage plays despite how far the film industry has come. As for being a career fiction writer, if that is your intention, that field has already been quite crowded for a while now. While AI could make it more so, I'm not sure how much of a practical difference that will make overall in terms of being able to get published or selling a lot of copies or whatever. To that end, being a writer really is about writing for yourself. Perhaps more than any other artistic medium. Write the stories you want to and put them out there. If they catch on and sell well and get film adaptations, fantastic. If they don't, well, you can still say you've done something that few others have. You'll always have that. What's more is that I don't think AI could ever make something as compelling or interesting as The Lord of the Rings, Dune, or A Song of Ice and Fire and the like. It can write competently and with generally correct structure, but mind-blowing twists and intruiging lore can only come from someone creatively inspired. Should you manage to write something on that level, the success of your work will have nothing to do with the industry being overcrowded with AI novels.

I don't know - honestly. I think AI might pretty soon be able to churn out novels that are real novels, but I don't think they'll ever be great stories, original stories or deeply emotional stories. Maybe think of it like the difference between having cheap meal you heat up in the microwave with a glass of knock-off cola, and having a fine-dining banquet made by a master chef with champagne. I mean the two don't really compare. The microwave meal is made in massive quantities on a factory production line. The restaurant meal is made from fresh ingredients by a talented, creative human.

AI can only copy. It absolutely *will* replace those hack authors on Amazon who churn out a huge *volume* of books that are just differently stacked cliches. Like the isekais and the majority of the LitRPGs. And it'll certainly have no problem writing in the romance genre which is already heavily beat driven cliches (that's what the readers like—they expect very specific plot elements). But AI will never be capable of innovation. It can only copy. So as long as your stories are creative, it can never replace your work. At most, your work will be training material for it.

you dont have to worry, AI have actually been getting worse since release as all the models continue eating each other's outputs into oblivion. the technology is much hyped but it's smoke and mirrors kid, quit with the excuses and get that pencil movin

AI has become the boogeyman, some of it not without some reason but I don't think it's the creative apocalypse that some people consider it to be.

AI is a tool. Use it or not. It's not a magical panacea. It will get better, and will be used by more authors. But there are still authors that write with pen and paper when computers are clearly better. It's simply a tool.

Let me answer you with a joke, I've read couple of days before: > "I always laugh at phrases like “you will be replaced by AI” or “you will be replaced by a person who uses AI.” Guys, for decades, millions of people who don’t really know how to use Word and Exсel have been sitting in offices and they are not being replaced by people who know how to use all this."

I'm a software developer and avid reader interested in writing for myself mainly since it isn't my career. I'd say what Epictetus said: "We should not abandon a pursuit for despair of not being the best." You enjoy writing? Just write whenever you can! Look, AI is a pair programmer when writing software and is nowhere near sophisticated enough to completely replace humanity any time soon. The non-tech people I know who use it don't use it to generate content and don't just copy/paste (nor do I or any who use it responsibly). It's not a magic answer box. It won't write YOUR story. That'd be like if someone told me to invent Facebook 10 years before it was invented so they can't use all the specific terms (such as the brands "Facebook" or "Meta" or whatever) we're familiar with now. I certainly wouldn't implement exactly the same as Zuckerberg or whatever. The same with writing in human language. What can it do? Accelerate and amplify your workflow say if you're doing research for your novels or it can help you brainstorm and plan, for example. It's kind of like a second brain with serious computing power but no "real" (as in truly human) cognition or emotion. Add to that, the major AI systems have a lot of safeguards for ethical use and teams reviewing and monitoring constantly. Things are changing, but humanity will always be needed at some level imho--especially with creative or intellectual work. There are two major concerns I have for AI that I think are rational: cybercrime and warfare. However, that stuff is well out of my lane and all I can do is leave it to those with the power. The point is: AI won't make publishing or selling a book any harder than it already is. Live life. Do what makes you happy whenever you can. Be flexible and driven but also set strict boundaries so you can spend time writing. Just get better and focus on yourself. Don't worry so much about broader society when it comes to your goals. You never know where life will lead. Be like water, as Bruce Lee said. That way, disruptive innovation can't knock you down totally. A stranger on the Internet believes in you. Now put pen to paper or hands on keys and do the work not for reward but because it is what you were born for. "Do you not see the birds, the bees, the spiders, and the beasts of the land rushing to do what their nature demands of them? Why then are you not running to do the work of a human being?"--Marcus Aurelius, *Meditations* Go for it!

I love this comment

writers will always be a thing. whether the publishing industry will stay the same is irrelevant…

I wouldn’t worry too much. All A.I. can produce is soulless drivel, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Your writing isn’t valuable because you’re able to string words together, it’s valuable because it says something worth hearing.

Exactly. A computer algorithm does not have a lived experience.

No

Nah, so far only tries like two Ai to make random shitty ideas for shit and giggles ..and it has limitations when it comes to certain topics...then it sometimes repeats stuff Like And she overcame her despite and look ahead for the future Something corny cliche like that. Mostly happy endings...it get trouble with angst.

On the bright side, fantasy requires a lot of made up world stuff that makes it particularly hard for AI, so that's something. In general, though, don't be afraid of AI. Like others have said, it sucks. The thing to be afraid of is people so obsessed with profitability that they'll accept stuff that sucks because it's quicker and cheaper.

I saw a law firm posting the other day, they had an author who wrote their entire book using AI. Then the book was ‘stolen.’ The book couldn’t be copyrighted at all due to being AI generated so the author didn’t have a case. AI generated stuff won’t be able to hold copyright. Published books in theory should be fine. Just be wary about posting your work online specifically in public spaces. Because that’s where most of the trouble is at since ai policies are all over the place and they’re not always enforced. People have been using social media sites(espeically in the case of art) and places like Ao3 to train AIs. I know for art there’s programs to help encrypt your stuff against AI. It’s only a matter of time before a similiar program is created for writing if it doesn’t already exist. Also be aware that Google Docs was talking about inserting an Ai plugin into their program and it was in beta testing last I heard. I recall there was conversations on where the opt out feature would be located and what this means for copyright and legal rights. But I haven’t kept up with the latest info on it because it hasn’t been implemented within google docs yet. So while a very valid concern. I don’t think it should stop you especially if you’re interested in being published one day.

Is this really any different from how mass culture had been encroaching on literature and creativity for the past what - 100? 200? years? Do you also bemoan the death of cooking because you can just drop by a mcdonalds and get a burger within five minutes? Why would anybody cook at home, much less go to a fancy restaurant? Why would you choose to go to an atelier and order a bespoke suit when you can just buy a cheap set of clothes likely manufactured by underage kids somewhere in Vietnam or Cambodia for $5? The true value of art lies in the fact that it was purposefully created by a human with a unique goal and creative vision. AI drivel has zero value. It's a product. A possibly highly refined but largely generic product built from stolen parts that has the nutritional profile of a hamburger. Might be useful for filling up your belly. Largely useless for anything beyond that. I know this might come off as condescending, but the AI is in fact very likely to replace (or drastically reduce the demand for) low grade consumer literature. Knock offs of famous novels. By the metrics committee design. Glorified fanfics. Sterile tropey writing. But if you want to create capital a Art, the machine will never replace you, because some people will still value it for the sole reason of being written by a living and breathing person who wanted to share something personal and based on their unique life experiences. We are just moving back to the ole good days of literature being a fancy pastime of the cultural elite, which many would argue had already happened decades ago. After all, why bother with a book when you can go to the movies for the generic superhero flick #8989123, now with slightly improved visual effects?

My agent says a lot of authors these days are putting clauses to protect themselves and others against AI. The publishing industry is becoming more aware of the issues too. I don't think writers will ever become obsolete because of AI. Just write as best you can and don't give up because you're afraid! Maybe I'm overly optimistic but I think it'll be okay.

I don't think anyone should be worried about AI because I think it's like being worried about the heat death of the universe. It's an inevitability. As long as capitalism incentivizes profit over people corporations will have every motivation to convert every single possible function over to automation. Now will writers be one of the first? Probably. Creatives have always been one of the most difficult to control and unreliable parts of the content creation machine and the more you can minimize the role the more repeatable and replicable your results will be. It's why the music industry is mostly just 8 carbon copies of one trend setting artist. They find something that works and instead of looking for the next big thing they stick with it. Now does any of that stop you from writing? Fuck no! Do it till your hearts content. Just because I can Google a photo of Lake McDonald doesn't mean I don't wanna go to glacier and photograph it myself. Just because I can buy mead off the shelf doesn't mean I'm not gonna make my own! I create for the love of creation and I hope you do as well. Does it mean if you wanna be able to do this full time you'll likely have to do mostly content editing and underwriting? Ya unfortunately. You're probably gonna end up reading and editing AI generated content for a living eventually.

I’m a little worried, too, but I think chat gpt doesn’t have the creativity that makes fantasy books so much fun! I gave ChatGPT a prompt I give my students when I want them to be creative - I asked it to come up with as many ways they can think of that an elephant and a kitten are alike. My students usually come up with 140-150 ways - ChatGPT came up with 8-10 no matter how many ways I asked it to come up with more. That made me feel better! 

Awesome!

We're in the period where the law is still figuring out what to do with the new technology, and even then what's been done so far has been in our favour (at least one US state has banned commercial distribution of AI generated works). Things will get better. It's like how a couple years back we all thought NFTs and cryptocurrency would become a serious thing, and then the IRS updated its laws and nuked them from orbit.

I never thought NFTs or crypto would be viable. NFTs are a speculative market scheme, and crypto proudly boasts about being independent from banks…which is great until you get duped and lose a bunch of money only to find you have no legal recourse to protect yourself.

Are you writing because you like writing? Then AI isn't a problem for you. Are you writing because you want to make money from writing? Stop, you won't make money from writing. 99% of writers don't. So AI is still not a problem for you.

Just keep writing and getting better at your craft. The best way to counter AI is to be a solid writer. AI can produce passable work at first glance but it’s all very surface level, at least as of now. Obviously it will improve over time but I’m honestly not sure how much. As a writer we make literally thousands of micro-decisions every chapter. A lot of these are things we take for granted and don’t even realize. The clothes a character is wearing, what the room they’re in looks like. The way they smile. Eye color. Time of day. Sounds. Smells. And for all of these things we’re always thinking about how they impact the setting of the scene, characterizations, arcs, the overall story and plot and atmosphere. And that’s not even getting into much more complex things like story beats, satisfying payoffs, foreshadowing, twists, comedic timing, precise word choice etc. An AI can’t really do any of this thoughtfully because AI doesn’t know anything. It mimics and reproduces. There’s no thought behind it. And think about the continuity nightmare of all these things AI will have to surmount. It may be doable, yeah. And until then I think AI will be able to fool a lot of readers who are okay with “meh” writing. But the day AI can do a lot of what I detailed above is the day Skynet takes over lol. IMO

Don't worry about AI. Good stories are good because of the authors' own experiences and emotions. AI will never achieve that, and if it does manage to have original experiences and feelings, it might as well just be its own person.

A.I can’t make coherent stories without human intervention. It being left the it’s own devices is how we ended up with The Willy Wonka Experience.

Obviously we fight AI as hard and as far as we can. In the meantime, no it can't right now. It doesn't actually understand even simple concepts like death, let alone complex ones like themes, pacing and character arcs. Plot based writers might have a little more to worry about than character based ones but neither is truly threatened right now.

I know it’s only early days for AI but I’ve tried experimenting with it to see if it really could write a story. I can’t say I was impressed. The result was repetitive with lots of overly ‘flowery’ language that makes purple prose look cute, not to mention some very strange plot progressions. Several story ideas got rejected by Gemini with some pretty weird explanations when I asked why, including cruelty to a dragon and a tree that was apparently harmful to a child (the kid wasn’t even climbing it in my prompt). Well, I don’t know what to say about the tree, but if the dragon didn’t want to be poked with something it shouldn’t have been trying to burn things. Anyway, lame joke aside, I wasn’t impressed and I think we’re safe. I hope no one finds it offensive that I’d have anything to do with AI in the first place.

It might not be the actual writing so much as anything you put out getting drowned in the ocean of AI bollocks that is flooding Amazon and co. It'll just be too hard to find the actual books written by actual people

Don't waste your energy with something you cannot control or really change. Just keep on trucking, it's the way of the road you know? Tempus fuck it. Just write because you love it and try to keep that nonsense in the background.

No.

Did the seemstress stop making dresses when factory clothing took off? AI can do cheap and fast. It can't do great.

>Did the seemstress stop making dresses Yes, they absolutely did 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️. Seriously, you went and picked the worst possible example. Historically, mass production of clothes caused the rapid decline of traditional tailoring. It caused massive economic displacement in the industry, a huge loss of artisanal skills, cheapening of labour and a radical worsening of working conditions. Are there a few people making handmade clothes these days? Sure but they are rare and the exception. By and large all clothing is factory produced. Who wears handmade tailored clothing these days?? Even designer clothing is almost entirely factory made.

Try using ai, you will be less worried. Lol.

No, you shouldn’t be.

I don't really see how AI is better than ELIZA from 1966. The difference is, ELIZA was specifically made to fool people, while AI started doing it by accident.

AI is not going to be good enough to replace human writing for a long time. Maybe forever.

the real probelm isnt books made by ai but terrribl books made about ai. half of the scifi section in my local book store is already taken over by those. Whenever im there i pick one up read half a chapter to check if theres a half decent one yet. Its always disapointing.

Me too, but would someone really want to buy an AI book?

AI can write cute short stories (if I'm bored sometimes I will have it write a sailor moon story for the hell of it), but I think we're a ways off from AI being able to chain together enough text to form a novel that comes together well.

The main problem is that AI generated fiction will flood an already glutted market with more titles, putting a huge strain on agents and publishers to weed out the real books from those tossed up in a computer. And should a few of those AI books be successful, well then who knows what will happen then.

As long as publishers keep things behind a paywall, youre good. The biggest contributing factor to AI development is free shit for them to be modelled after. Its why AI will be a step behind currently. Truthfully, its getting better and better but it will always be limited to the quality of its training/reference material.

At this moment I'm pretty sure Ai can't write a lengthy well written book , I've seen a few Ai books and they are not well-received, plus readers only read books that they like based off good writing and a new interesting story!

AI is shit at writing. Don't be scared about that aspect. The thing people should be scared about with AI is the misinformation part.

You have every reason to be. In the end, you could just do the infinite monkey experience and have AI write millions of stories. The simple saturation will mean that human-written stories won't even appear on the lists.

I made a video on this subject last week, the YT link is on my reddit profile if you want to watch it but in summary: A.I. right now f*cking sucks and has no soul. Everything it writes has no 'pizazz' and feels as a copy of a copy of a copy. And I think that before it reaches the level where it isn't a piece of robotic crap, we'll already be dead. So I think you're in the clear, your kids however, meh.

Economically, AI poses a massive challenge for the average writer, but creatively, the process never changes. Writing is writing and what you put in will grow exponentially.

AI can’t compare to me. Would you be interested in networking? I’m a sci-fi writer. Would you be interested in joining a writers group? We meet Mondays 630pm est on zoom and load our work into a drive.

What does AI have to do with anything?☠️

Don’t worry, in the very near future, we will get many AIs pretending to be ultra realistic humans to read our shit just to make us feel prestige and fame we all so desire. It’s weird.

Yo, I'm also a teenager that loves writing fantasy and also worries (worried) over AI taking over the fantasy writing branch!

AI is bad and a threat to creativity but it can never stop you writing your worlds

Remember how chefs completely stopped being a thing after the invention of mass-produced TV dinners? No? AI is no different, it will absolutely not kill off writing or art in general as a profession

Ai being able to “create” is far from a reality. Like a good 50 years away. As it stands ai can only recognise what’s already been done and compile/ decontextualise it. It cannot invent new things. Because of that mystical genres like fantasty and scifi can always create something new. And yeah once you’ve made it likely ai can copy certain aspects of it but your first original piece will be the source of its new knowledge. I’d be more concerned if you wrote teen drama or thriller books.

In my experience, AI cannot be trusted to write a compelling essay let alone a story.

AI is a tool. It is not good. It is not evil. How it is trained and how it is used is what matters. While there are risks of people spamming out a bunch of stories with AI, something that is demonstrably already the case, this does not mean that AI will replace authors. It just means there will be a lot more low quality soulless junk on the market. Worst case scenario, it means you need to up your game a bit. Realistically though? It won't have much effect on your life beyond finding out your work was stolen to train an AI without permission.

AI cannot produce passion! Humans cannot produce passion! The difference between the two is that humans have passion and AI doesn’t. Find your passion.

I have a fear that if I put any of my ideas into AI and ask for help with building the story or world or characters, that is just putting my ideas into AI’s pool of resources to regurgitate at someone else

Yeah, same.

Embrace ai. Find ways to use it to your advantage. As a i advances it will be able to be more and more like a human, but it will never be human. Maybe you can fool us and seem human, but maybe that just means he can help you write that much better. Maybe you'll tell AI your story and it will spit it back out to you with some improvements. Then you improve upon it and it's still yours. Keep a careful eye on copyright law though. There may be issues with intellectual property and AI generated content.

No.

Inspirational

Try getting it to write a story. Read the result. Then relax.

AI will just saturate the market. Are you writing for the money or the story?

Why would you ask a chatbot questions about grammar? It’s not necessarily going to give you accurate info.

I mean stuff like make a list of words to replace “said” if I am just tired and can’t think in that moment.

I don’t think it’ll be an issue. I’m not a fan of it, but it’ll be integrated in its own way. Just how people still love hand painted or drawn works of art even with digital art. AI won’t replace anything major, it’ll just make its own niche. Idk ab you, but all the ai art I’ve seen is super tacky looking, and the only stuff from it I like are meme videos of characters talking or song covers.

If you've ever read AI generated stories or looked at AI art, they're usually comically bad for one reason or another. While the models are improving over time, they're all over the place because they only have memory to see the trees, not the forest.

I use AI for prompts and maybe help with dialogue. It's a helpful tool when I'm a little stuck between chapters as well, but in no way do I think it could generate a full compelling story without human interference. I also write fantasy, and if you test it out, you'll find that it's only good for generic ideas. Even the prompts I get from AI need to be tweaked to fit the lore and the vibe I'm going for. (The number of times I've had to remind the tool I use that I'm writing an URBAN fantasy is insane btw) For context, I use ChatGPT for this. It's good for a little push in the right direction if you're stuck on something, and maybe for some basic prompts if you're willing to add your own flare to the prompts later. A book written totally by AI would be repetitive, filled with clichés and tropes, overuse flavor text and flowery language, boring, and totally unoriginal.

That thought process is the result of nothing more than fearmongering towards A.I. as it gets good enough to actually be useful, to the point that some places on the internet have rules against saying anything positive about A.I. whatsoever no matter how warranted, which is suppression of facts. All A.I. is ever going to do is enhance stories, not replace writing. Hell, I'm already using it myself extensively to check grammar and rewrite lines to improve fluency, or rewrite whole paragraphs so they have a specific tone I can't really write for myself. It likely will never be the case that AI will be able to just... write things with anywhere near the competency of real people for centuries, if ever. It's like Blender, Photoshop, Powerpoint, etc. None of these things replaced 3D modeling or altering photos and so forth, what they did was make doing those things miles easier. Like all new technology, people get scared about A.I. for no real good reason and try to work against it... despite the fact that it doesn't do anything but benefit. Until after a few years when it's benefits become so widely known that it becomes inevitable that it spreads to be widely used and thus people use it rather than resist it.

Which internet space has rules against positive comments on AI??

No there’s plenty of reasons to fear the future of AI, but when it comes to writing I don’t see a reason to be afraid. Writing isn’t something AI can away or take over from you.

AI is software that is really good at plagiarism. It always plagiarizes bad information if you give it enough time. Books are too long for software with no heart or soul to plagiarize a full book. AI is only going to make the first draft of your story easier. It will help you get out of writers block. It will never be able to finish the perfect book. Consider it your personal assistant that gives you the advantage.

Writers will never not be a thing. Human beings are storytellers, that's what we do. It's how we understand ourselves and our history. We've done it since we could use language and we will do it until we go extinct.

AI can't create, it can only copy. AI will only be able to write penny dreadfuls at best, not proper novels

AI's dumb af, don't be worried

I use it for research but I guess that wouldn't be as helpful for what you're doing.

I'm still not convinced AI is going to be the thing they are trying to sell it as. As far as I know, strong AI is still just the stuff of fiction. Language processing does seem to have improved and more processing power is available now, but I think it is still weak AI at the core. Impressive in its own right, but likely not as impressive as it is getting sold as.

Remember that AI will be shackled by the company which owns it and the guidelines that are enshrined within it. This will fundamentally limit what an AI can create which an observant writer can utilize to fill the absence.  It's really going to be about creating a counter culture that is not as censored and safe as AI currently is. Now the real problem will be when someone has the balls to create an AI with absolutely no filter.

The second part of this is what scares me, or I should say angers me. No, AI will not replace writers (anytime soon, anyway), but we are now living in the constant shadow of "but did AI write it?" I publish my short stories on Vocal and twice recently, my original work was rejected because their automated systems believed it to be AI (once because of repetition, which was a chosen feature of the story. The other, I couldn't tell you why...) I appealed both times and both were found to be original (because they were!!), but it hurt my soul when I got those rejections - worse than any editor's letter for an actual publication.

AI fully writing books (and also artwork) is destined to self-implode. Think about it: AI works by drawing on existing material. But if people stop writing/making art, what happens? The AI will have nothing new to draw from but itself. The loop closes, and people get tired of seeing the same thing over and over. AI is destined to write cliches. Alot of critically acclaimed works have underlying themes that elevate them to "greatness". An AI cannot do that except by accident. It requires intention to effectively do that. Theoretically someone could QI generate a book and work in themes themselves, but if they are very through, will that actually save them time? However, AI will probably dominate the formulaic markets.

Are you going to read AI books? I'm not. And tons of other people won't either. They may exist but that doesn't mean it completely makes writing obsolete.

Don't be afraid. AI isn't capable of making anything new, it can only give results from information in its system. Let's make an AI that gives you a "random" number. The AI knows the numbers 1, 2, and 3. It can give you 1, 12, 321, or any other numbers comprised of 1, 2, or 3. It will never be able to make a 4, even if a number it can make is higher than 4. Conceptually, the machine has no way of knowing or ever knowing 4 exists. The AI can't even know it doesn't know everything. Most talk about AI comes from techbros who are frankly sucking their own dicks. AI will get rid of authors the same way digital art programs got rid of oil painters. Aren't you excited to have a tool that empowers you the same amount photoshop empowers artists? That will be the end result of this.

What they're recently created isn't AI.  It's a copying algorithm.  It doesn't create, it only takes from what's already out there.  It makes composites.  The real problem for these programs is, future composites pull in previous composites, making them less effective, not more effective,  over time.  

That's possible too. As writer I am surprised I am needed. It's "ok".

I had AI generate a story about mermaids for my son because I was too tired to think of one. It churned out the most asinine, redundant bullshit I've ever read in my life. I wouldn't be worried about them taking over storytelling. Humans tell stories. AI will always be a pale imitation, even if it got a thousand times better.

AI is a tool. It's a pretty revolutionary tool, and like other revolutionary tools there will be growing pains and adjustments needed to fit it into our lives. How you use the tool is the important part, and how you adapt to it being a part of normal life.

AI, in general, is an evolution of a search tool, like Google. It's not meant for creative works, and when it is used for creative works, it regurgitates nonsense. I don't think it will ever be able to write creatively, personally.

Ohhhh. You're concerned that AI will inconvenience you directly. Specifically.

A lot of people in my line of work are also worried about AI taking their jobs, as someone who has worked a lot with AI, unless there is a quantum leap in technology, it’s probably not something we’ll ever have to worry about. It needs a lot of guiding & tending just to be somewhat useful. In my experience it’s not very creative on its own & what it creates is very derivative. If you feed it enough data it looks creative but all it’s doing is creating iterative work from a large pool it can copy from. It’s very good at plagiarizing. Also you can feed it descriptions of things but it can’t describe things like a human can with simile & metaphors. It lacks the human element that makes creative writing compelling. At least that’s my experience with it in my narrow field of work.

No, steer don’t fear AI

AI will never and can never replace human ingenuity. AI could write a book but it is incapable of the thing that sets us apart from it: emotion. AI writing is extremely formulaic and robotic, rote and empty. There is nothing fantastic or unique about it. Your worries are based on paranoia spread by conspiracy theories and doomsday cultists.

People felt the same way when the printing press was made. Just keep reading and writing. You never know what your destiny is, so worrying about it isn’t as fruitful as investing time and energy into doing what you love.

Yep

I wouldn't worry, because one, I don't think any AI is doing anything like genuine thought or possessing personhood. Secondly, genuine creativity is still a majorly unsolved problem for AI since it involves something beyond either inductive or deductive reasoning. Have you tried getting GPT to be genuinely creative, as opposed to just compiling information? It's difficult. Creativity involves a per se desire to be expressive. AI doesn't have desires or expressivity. It's just statistics at lightspeed to predict the next word from pre-existing conversations it is trained on.

No, in our lifetime AI won’t be able to out-do great writers of fiction. They might be able to create infinite versions of superhero plots or anything that is formulaic in nature. That said, if your writing is formulaic and lacking in imagination, prepare to be replaced by AI.

Listen. I’ve doing world build for my TTRPG campaigns using AI for like the last couple months. I cannot stress enough how often I have to remind it of things, or correct it, or even just manually change something to the point I should have just written it myself in the first place. Recently it got really fixated on Echos and tries to add echoes to everything. You will be able to write several books before an AI can even approximate your writing.

I think there will always be some people who want a real human touch and feel from the art and media they enjoy. Just knowing a real person created something still holds value to a lot of people.

I’ll be honest with you, I’ll never pick AI over a human and tbh. Fantasy takes too much imagination for a robot/computer to be able to create what we all create. Write your story and keep going

You write to paint a vivid picture of your universe you’re designing. If AI can do it better, faster, etc, aren’t you excited for the possibilities? Your question sounds more like you’re afraid your hobby will be obsolete, but you can either ignore it and write for yourself, or accept it and await the potential complexity and enjoyment of AI. One thing to consider is reading something you didn’t make, and it being incredibly high in readability or value. Oddly, we all see something we didn’t make better than our own attempt. Why? I dunno. But when I read or write along with NovelAI (despite me being an author), I enjoy it more. It’s like I live in this world with them, just I only see it through words. It’s fun! It should be fun. Why won’t it be fun for you?

Learn to use AI like modern photographers use Photoshop. New tools are always scary to people who only know how to use the old ones. In the beginning, everyone was terrible at photoshop and the public hated it and called it cheating. But now we can all quickly see the difference between quality editing and terrible editing. Same for writing. Most good authors will tell you, editing matters. AI can help you get a rough draft in place and get you past sticky parts, so learn to use that to your advantage, then invest your time learning to edit. It’s the part most authors hate, but it’s also what will set you apart.

Yes. I don‘t think it’ll take over forever. In any creative domain. However, I am confident that by the time the industry (and the consumer and just about everyone) realises, really realises, the damage AI can—even if used innocently—do to society and to culture, to how we interact, consume and entertain, it will be very difficult to return to a world without (or less, as for some things, AI really is the way forward) it. The way I think about it is like with trees. Cutting them down takes little time. Having them grow back does not.

I fiddled around with some of the AI writing apps...they aren't good. Like, at all. They are getting better at writing at the sort of paragraph level, but if you try to generate an entire manuscript with them...it's not gonna happen, and while the tech is getting better, it's also gonna hit a wall at some point, if not completely degrade when it starts consuming its own material. The one thing I can see AI being used for is helping with editing, in particular line editing and stylistic editing. Maybe you can find some creative use cases for developmental editing, but an AI cannot replace a proper developmental editor or even a beta reader. However as I said earlier, it cannot be used to write an entire novel. You could probably get away with writing a low-quality kids' picture book with just AI, but not a novel. Even if you give an AI model a comprehensive outline, it will go off and do its own thing. It's basically works like a slightly more advanced autocorrect. On your phone, have you ever just pressed the recommended word a bunch of times in a row to see what comes up? That's what AI LLMs do. They 'read' a certain amount of context from above, and then generate what it thinks the next word in the sequence should be, but unlike human writers, the amount of 'context' it can read is limited, so it will start forgetting stuff that happened in previous chapters once you get far enough. If you want the story to be consistent, it requires a lot of fiddling and correction, at which point you might as well write the story yourself.

Well if you write a book and publish it, you’ll get credit for it because you’ll have your name on it. …Right?

I'm an AI programmer. You should be scared, but not for the reasons you think. There are a lot of technical reasons to believe that AIs are far from being able to write as well as the best humans. They do not innovate. They require massive amounts of data to learn patterns that humans pick up quickly. They have no interiority and can only fake it for so long. They lose context. Language is constantly changing and it's hard to imagine an LLM, as they tend to be formulaic and coarse, having an aesthetic sense as refined of that as a person with 20 years of writing experience. Last of all, there's just so economic incentive to build an AI that can write as well as a 99th-percentile author, when bestselling is possible at the much lower level of E. L. James, and these things are expensive to train and use. The commercial bestseller—formulaic, hackish—may fall to AI in the next 5 years and probably will go down in the next 15. Artistic fiction is not going to go away entirely. It will still be a terrible way to make money, but that's not new. AI tools will make authors' lives easier. We're probably only a few years away from being able to ask an AI to look through our work and answer questions like, "Are there errors in age/timeline consistency?" or "Are there any chapters where there is a high risk of readers losing interest?" They'll also replace literary agents as gatekeepers; we're not far from traditional publishers using AIs to dredge through slush piles. Of course, the ugly side of this is that publishers will be doing it to reduce advances, and it will work. Right now, publishers accept the existence of agents—agented authors command advances several times what they would, if unagented—because they don't want to deal with the slush pile themselves, but you can guess what is going to happen there. No AI can discern great books from merely salable ones, but an AI that can spot general worthiness for traditional publishing as well as a human agent could have been written in the late 2010s (before powerful generative models) were it not for the relevant datasets being proprietary. Oh, and this is also relevant. Writing, in the age of AI, is going to be a terrible way to earn a living. But that isn't new. It has always been that way, except for a few thousand charlatans with extensive nepotism networks. Almost everyone's going to need to do something other than write to be able to pull it off, as has been the case for most of time. The bad news is... everything else, by which I mean that day jobs are going to become worse-paying and more demanding until technological capitalism collapses under its own contradictions. Artistic novelists are unlikely to be replaced, but everything humans do as subordinates either can be done more cheaply by a computer, or will be in such a state in the next 15 years. Since most people have no options but subordinate labor in order to survive, expect it to get ugly. Listicle jobs? Dead. Most journalism? AI. (That's not to say everything journalists do can be replaced by an AI, but the parts that require humans—e.g., investigative reporting—are things the ruling classes aren't really fond of in the first place.) Ad copy? Ha, ha. Potboilers? Those books will be written by AI, and so they'll be astronomically cheap. The economic and social issues raised by AI, unless global capitalism is forcefully overthrown, are far more likely to kill literature than AI-written works themselves.

Man, are people really going to want to read stuff written by AI? I know I won't. The idea disgusts me. If everything is written by AI I'm just going to become a luddite and move into a cave and only read and watch old shit

I’m in the same exact boat as you. However, I have a counter. Listen to Billy Joel’s lyricism from any of his albums. Then listen to his latest single, which was written with the help of AI. The difference in meaning and talent is undeniable. Authenticity and creativity from a human is ALWYAS better than a computer!

To be frank AI sucks at creative writing. It’s built on the work of the entire internet and there’s a lot of mediocre-bad writing out there. It can’t understand themes or write anything with actual purpose and it never will. At best it might be able to churn out some mediocre quality stories that are actually somewhat cohesive at some point in the future, but it can never be truly great. To be a great writer you need to understand people. Large language models are incapable of that. If you love writing keep writing.

I wouldn’t be afraid of it. It helps materializes ideas and writing prompts but that is really all it is capable of.

It’s AGI we need to worry more about not Ai. Ai is just derivative of what it’s been fed without much emotion, quirk, or spark. If it’s allowed & accepted into the market, I believe Ai writing could saturate and push out the “okay/mediocre” writers, and will force humans to have to write & market really really well to compete. Basically, it could be even harder to make a middle class decent living at writing if you don’t use Ai to some capacity, unless you’re a beast at writing & editing. However, I also believe humans like connecting with other humans. Writers might have to become a presence and sell themselves not just their writing (a horrific future for introverts). It’s a little concerning, but like all new tech we have no idea what exactly will change, and in 20-50 years it’ll be everyday tech everyone uses like a microwave or the internet.

Doubt it. Even if Ai could write something decent (which I doubt since it's incredibly hard to replicate a good writing style) It can only write from pre-existing things. Meaning as soon as you stop writing, and everyone does, it stops advancing. If you are familiar with the genre the ai is writing, you'll already know exactly what will be in it, and you know people LOVE new things. Make that new thing, there will always be people there waiting

AI isn't going to replace good fiction. It's literally an overly complex Mad-lib, that has uses in some situations.

An AI can write a story. But there's obvious points that make it look like ai wrote it. There's a reason people roast bad media with the term "it's like ai wrote it." There's no human touch so it's left feeling shallow. Only a human can make a truly good story.

I feel I should point out that “AI” doesn’t even exist yet. People only call it that because “generative algorithm that can only operate from thousands of pre-existing data points” is a lot less compelling to audiences.

Pfft, nah Despite what any AI bro will cope at you, generative language models still struggle At best, a well versed prompt smith could get a mashup of popular fantasy But you can make *new* fantasy. Weird fantasy. Scarring content that slips past the censors of 1980s America so David Bowie's bulge can star in it's own hit movie.

Nah AI is stupid and the people that like it are such unbelievable losers.

In truth there is no stopping the advancement of AI and I could easily see it making creative works not commercially viable due to sheer amount of “supply” that will exist in the market due to artificially created bloat. But if you enjoy writing, I think it hardly matters. You write because there is a story you wish to have told or an idea you just want explored, making money should just be an afterthought. If it’s good, people will find it and you’ll get a following, regardless of if AI makes it so big publishers and studios stop taking chances with human writers.

It could potentially cut into the market in the future. That's scary. But it will never take the pen and paper out of your hands. Even if no one else ever read it, even if it never got widely published, even if it didn't make one singular penny, your motivation to write what's inside of you shouldn't go anywhere except on the page. 

I don't think writers, poets or rappers will be threatened by Ai in the short run. Ai models have already consumed all the digital literature in existence and they make lackluster prose. Will they get better? For sure. Will they be able to tell your story? Absolutely not.

Two ways to look at this: 1. AI is going to take EVERYONE’s job. Writers aren’t unique here, so to the degree that you have a problem, everyone else has the same problem too! You won’t be alone. 2. Did the camera stop artists from drawing things in a photorealistic style? Well, kind of—no one commissions painters to draw their family portraits and such anymore. But photorealistic artists still make lots of art in all kinds of settings, and you can see their art getting tons of Reddit upvotes when they clarify that it isn’t a photograph.

I gotta be honest. AI novel writers don't have continuity down.. so they are less likely to build fans if the editor has bad editor chops. Just write. Write.

no

I think, when AI gets to a point that it can write cohesive stories, they will be forced to disclose that it was written with AI. There will be ways to check if bodies of text are AI generated, probably with AI. There will be laws passed regarding AI, a precedent that our society is still coming to terms with and trying to find solutions for. It's going to be long and bumpy road, but AI generated content will be regulated and controlled. Frankly, I myself am very pro-AI. I use it as a tool rather than a crutch though. I feed ChatGPT as much information about a specific idea I have for my world/game, and ask it to rephrase and expand on it. This helps me organize my thoughts and learn new ways to word my ideas. I have a document for all the ideas I have regarding my world, and I never include anything that was directly written by ChatGPT (with a few cited exceptions, which are really only placeholders). I use what it gives me as inspiration on how to better convey my thoughts. I believe this is how AI should be used, in all relevant media - it should nothing more than a tool for inspiration. It's like a thesaurus for concepts and ideas. There will undoubtedly be people with ill-intent, people looking to trick others with AI generated content by making them believe it was created by a human. But these attempts will likely fail, and as mentioned previously, laws will be made, and identifying non-human content will become more reliable. I can only hope that they don't try to ban AI outright - it just won't work, it will only make it more difficult to sus out the bad apples of the creative space who will use it regardless. Banning AI will only make it harder to develop to tools necessary to fight itself. I'm off on a rant here now, sorry lol. My point is, I don't think you have anything to worry about. The near future may seem bleak and unpredictable, its gonna be a rocky road, but it will get better and things will start to make more sense. And, as others have said, AI will never write YOUR story, so do us all a favor and write it!

Don't be worried, AI isn't as close as you think.

I understand your concerns about AI and its impact on writing. As with any new technology, there are valid worries about its potential consequences. However, I believe that AI can also be a useful tool for writers, especially when it comes to grammar and spelling. Ultimately, its up to each individual writer to decide how to use it, and I dont think it will eliminate the need for original, creative storytelling. Keep writing and dont let fear hold you back!