A few months ago, I applied to be a freelance writer for a fanfiction website that specialized in “choose your own adventure” fanfiction. The storyline would change depending on the choices you, the reader, made, which really highlights the whole y/n aspect of x Reader fanfiction in a unique way that I really loved. I sent in a bit of my work with my application, and within a few days heard back from a representative, offering an opportunity.
The more I looked into the website, though, the more uncomfortable I got. The “choose your own adventure” aspect was almost entirely controlled and written by AI. The way the website explains it, you start the intro yourself and create some of the choices, and the AI samples your work to use as an example to continue writing the choices itself, so that audiences have the option to make an original response, different from the pre-written ones the author has created. The website is upfront about its use of AI, to give them some credit, but they market it as a tool used to uplift writer’s, not take anything away from them.
Now, I’m not here to bash the website, but here’s my issue; I’ve written choose your own adventures before, without the use of AI. It’s tedious and time consuming, but I wouldn’t exactly say it’s hard. I wrote it for a high school public speaking class, and it was one of seven short stories I wrote for the class over the course of two months. It’s all a matter of mapping and planning. I don’t need AI for that, and, to be frank, I don’t want it either.
AI is a worker bee that’s supposed to die after it stings you, but refuses to do so. It keeps stinging, over and over again, sometimes in the same place and sometimes in new ones, and drops to the ground when you try to swat at it. So you think, okay, it’s dead, good, and then you put your arms down and it whirs back to life and stings you again.
As a recent college graduate with an English degree, 95% of available jobs for people with English degrees are in training AI to write the stories and scripts that real people could write better. (The other 5% of jobs, if you were wondering, are high school tutoring jobs or jobs that require 7+ years of journaling experience. I’m having a really fun time). It’s entirely based on cost, how little money companies can spend on work in order to make the same or higher profit. I can’t say much about the industry outside of America, although I know AI is a global issue, but as an American I can say that this isn’t a surprise to me, as America, as it stands currently, is built on little else but capitalism and the destruction of natural beauty and creation. Dramatic phrasing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate.
And we could have the argument that AI could be useful for some things, and that’s a conversation I would willingly have, but do you know what AI is never useful for? Art. Storytelling. Filmmaking. The reason for this, and please forgive me for being incredibly sappy and sentimental and whatever other synonyms you want to use, is because AI likes heart.
Think about it; half of the jokes you see online about ao3, are they about the stories? No, they’re not. They’re about the authors. They’re about authors going through harrowing (and alright, pretty hilarious) circumstances while writing, or who don't speak English as their first language but write like Shakespeare reincarnated, or who make it obvious where they’re from because they write colour instead of color and apartment instead of flat. AI is soulless. AI has nothing to dissect, find deeper meaning in, connect with. When I read I Who Have Never Known Men, half of what made the book so beautiful and heart wrenching was the ability to look into it further, to see Jacqueline Harding as a Jewish woman during World War II, and that adds something really important.
Not every book is a literary masterpiece that can be dissected and discussed across three different English classes by a group of 17-year-olds, but it will always have perspective. People write from experience, or interest, or passion. A computer would never be able to write From Here To Eternity by Caitlin Doughty because a computer hasn’t been a mortician for several decades and hasn’t learned to appreciate and respect worldwide death customs. A computer couldn’t have written Open: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates because no fucking shit, a computer has never been a widow, and does not understand the concepts of love or grief or rage. Stories about queer youth is less than meaningless if they're not written by minds like Andrew Joseph White, Carter Sickels, and Anita Cornwell.
Computers are empty, and yet they are so void of anything of substance that this emptiness doesn’t even mean anything. They can’t even express the feeling of emptiness, of absence or desolation, because they have nothing else to compare it to, and so in this sense, the singular feeling they could be capable of, they aren’t.
Even authors who don’t care about what they write offer something of value, because they have the mind to not care. Every author who writes a mind-numbing money-grab memoir - because of course they do, we’ve all been in a Barnes & Noble - has made a statement about themselves. It might not be a flattering statement, but there is a statement. Something is being said. Art is meant to be looked into, personalized, explored. If a computer is filling out a prompt you gave them, none of this is happening. It’s a waste of time and resources, and it’s metallic. I hate it. God, there are few things I hate more than AI art, in every and all mediums.
Now, is there a point to writing this? No, not really. The sheer amount of AI music, stories, and paintings I’ve been seeing recently has been pissing me off, and that's about all there is too it. I’m no John Keating, but I love art. I dedicated my life to it. I mean, what the fuck kind of job am I going to get with an English degree and a creative writing concentration? What are the options here, other than publish or die? I’m a T1D 22 year old who has to somehow get decent health insurance before I turn 26, and I decided yeah, let’s try the publishing world! That’ll probably go really well! How do you know? Literally how do you know? I don't, but I'm doing it anyway because it matters to me, because I love it, because I work hard at it and after months or even years of writing something, I have enough compassion for and belief in humanity to want to share that with other people. That is a sentiment that no AI can replicate. Happy Writing.
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