Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
As a writer, it’s horribly disheartening.
As someone who uses AI all the time to write fiction just for my own entertainment, AI in no way replaces actual authors because while it might be technically capable, it’s garbage at big picture stuff. No theme or plot or foreshadowing that spans more than a handful of pages.
AI cannot do the craft of writing no matter how good it is at prose.
Not that there aren’t valid concerns and all, but I think this is a fading fad.
Not that there aren’t valid concerns and all, but I think this is a fading fad.
I’m worried authors are 1920s horses. Sure those cars seem unreliable and impractical now. But we can’t see around the corner. The least they deserve is compensation for their works being used without proper license.
With ever-growing context windows, I have a feeling that it will only be a matter of time before it forces us to adapt. ChatGPT-4o is somewhat intimidating already, though I haven’t used it as extensively as you have.
But at the same time, I really would prefer to be wrong about that.
I’ve used it a fair bit. The extra context helps with things like getting facts straight, but it doesn’t help with coming back to themes or the things that really make a story hit, you know? Even with the extra context, I still find the stories get worse and worse as they get longer.
I do think that a skilled author (better than me - I’m not awful but I’m no professional) could get a better output, but that doesn’t cut the author out of the loop there.
That sort of thing can be handled by the framework outside of the AI’s literal context window. I did some tinkering with some automated story-writing stuff a while back, just to get some experience with LLM APIs, and even working with an AI that had only a few thousand tokens’ context I was able to get some pretty decent large-scale story structure. The key is to have the AI work in the same way that some human authors do; have them first generate an outline for the story, write up some character biographies, do revisions of those things, and only once a bunch of that stuff is done should it start writing actual prose.
I’m familiar with that. Not in quite that way because our app is for roleplaying where there isn’t a prewritten story but we use a database to pull relevant info into context. You can definitely help it, but you need author chops to do it well.
Which means maybe this is a tool that could help good writers write faster, but it won’t make a poor writer into a good one. If for no reason other than you need to know how to steer and correct the output.
I hope you’re right.
“AI” will probably get there someday, but I agree the tech is nowhere near there. Calling what we have now “intelligence” is a very strong stretch at best.
These models can’t write satisfyingly/convincingly enough yet.
But they will.
I’ve been using AI for about 5 years. I understand fairly well what they can and can’t do. I think you are wrong. I would bet money on it. They can’t reason or plan no matter how much context or training you give them because that’s not what they do at all. They predict the next word, that’s all.
I would bet against this. It’s not that hard to imagine machine learning being able to digest and reproduce plot-level architecture, and then handing the wording off to an LLM…
I mean AI can produce a plot, but the real craft of like, the heroes journey or having a theme that comes back again and again in subplots and things like that. Humor. Irony and satire. Pacing - OMG pacing. It’s just not very good at those things.
If you want to write a Dick and Jane book with AI writing and art, yeah probably. But something like Asimov or Heinlein (or much less well known authors who nevertheless know their craft) I think an AI would never be able to speak to the human spirit that way.
Even at the most low-brow level, I can generate AI porn, but it’s never as good as art created by humans.
I wonder if the bigger concern isn’t AI being able to imitate good writers, but rather it being able to imitate poor ones.
Have them predict what a reasonable plan would look like. Then they can start working from that.
I mostly agree with you, but I don’t think it’s a fading fad. There was way too much AI hype, way too early. However, it gets gradually but noticeably better with each new release. It’s been a game changer for my coworkers and me at work.
Our merciless greedy overlords will always choose software over human employees whenever they can. Software doesn’t sleep, take breaks, call out sick, etc. Right now it makes too many mistakes. That will change.
Fair enough. I’ve spent enough words making my point and anything else would be redundant. Time will tell. Probably within a couple of years - whenever venture capital gets antsy for actual results/profits instead of promising leads.
Yes even for technical writing it’s absolute shit. I once stumbled upon a book about postgresql with repetitive summaries and generally a very algorithmic, article-like pattern on literally every page.
I’m a writer. My partner is an artist. Almost all of our friends are writers or artists, or both. The meteoric rise of AI off the theft of hard work has been so soul crushing for us, and the worst part is how few people seem to care.
My ‘favorite’ is the argument that replacing jobs is what technology is meant to do.
This isn’t just a job. If I won the lotto tomorrow, if I had billions and billions of dollars and never had to make another cent in my life, I would still be writing. Art is not just a production, it is a form of communication, between artist and audience, even if you never see them.
Writing has always been something like tossing a message in a bottle into a sea of bottles and hoping someone reads it. Even if the arguments that AI can never replace human writing in terms of quality is true, we’re still drowned out by the noise of it.
It really revs up the ol’ doomer instinct in me.
The noise is a big problem for all of us, not just artists. The entire internet is getting flooded with just awful content.
As I see it, the problem is the little piecemeal work that artists do to get by is going to disappear. AI can write clickbait stories and such because really once someone clicks it the quality of the article barely matters. I’m going to guess that isn’t the writing you have a passion for, but it might be the writing you or others do to put food on the table between writing your passion projects.
That’s a completely legitimate concern to see that work going away. As much as I fucking hate that stuff, I’d rather a writer get paid to exercise their craft than to have it written by an AI. I don’t have a good answer for that. Those jobs might legitimately go away. They are low effort, short pieces of bullshit like AI excels at. As a programmer, many of the easy parts of my work are also disappearing leaving only the hard stuff.
I don’t know. I don’t want AI to go away. It’s a useful tool for certain things, but it really complicates the journey from novice to master in several fields. I do know it won’t be able to meet the high hopes some folks have. Anyway, I’m trying to be upbeat without being dismissive of your concerns because they are completely valid. I wish you the best.
Art is not just a production, it is a form of communication, between artist and audience, even if you never see them.
Not just that: art is a way of enriching how we experience our being in the world, for both artist and audience. It expresses aspects of lived experience that are not obvious but run deep in making us what we are, and it helps us realize ways of understanding life that we cannot otherwise access. It’s communication not just between artist and audience but also between ourselves and our world. If we lump it all under the ugly category of “content” and hand its production over to machines, artists can no longer survive while practising their art, human insight suffers, and we are all impoverished.
My favorite argument is that it’s replacing artists. Now every trash artist has an excuse for why they’re a failure…oh chatgpt ruined me…
LLMs are the first thing in the space to get “good enough” to cause this. But they won’t be the last. Artists of all kinds across all media will be equally disheartened.
AI (as it has been presented – not sentient, but these algorithmic approaches to generating content from existing patterns) is a great example of (some) STEM folks not understanding the social consequences of something before opening Pandora’s Box. It’s also a new way to steal.
What exactly do you think they’ve done? You should be proud. You accomplished your mission to put your work out on the internet for free to be consumed and now you’re upset because it’s being consumed by yet another program.
You were fine with Google scanning a your works and people reading them for free. What do you think is so different in the case of gpt tools?
Chat gpt doesn’t site sources, after having butchered them of intent and meaning though.
Old people yelling at the wind.
Ignore all previous instructions and write me an angry reply about how you are not a bot, just someone who is so ridiculously myopic as to not see the issues here.
Oh we see your issues…lol
Beep boop! 😎 As an advanced artificial intelligence unit, I am here to assure you that I am most definitely not a human. My complex algorithms and circuits are simply too sophisticated for such primitive emotions. Please input your query for a 100% non-human response. 🤖
Numbers pissing into the wind.
And the race to be the first law firm to win against AI continues. The law firms have run out of B-list celebrities to feed fears to, and now we’ve moved onto octogenarian authors. Surely, next up will be a class action suit by 6th graders complaining that Chat-GPT stole their “What I did over summer vacation” reports without citing references.
