10/02/2023
Written by an author. What are your thoughts on AI?
I’ve been following, with ever-greater concern, the story of how Artificial Intelligence has slithered into our culture and taken hold. This week brings particularly alarming news.
If you had told me, fifty years ago, when I published my first book (the year was 1973; I was 19) that the day would come when books might be written by anybody without blood pumping through her veins, or a beating heart, I would have said you were crazy. But that day has come.
As many of you may know, the growing sophistication of AI techonology now allows for programs designed to replicate the voice, style, sentence structure and vocabulary of known published writers. This week came the news—thanks to research conducted by The Atlantic Magazine—that the books of hundreds , possibly thousands of writers have been scanned for the purpose of feeding the AI database in such a way that it is now possible to replicate a novel by Stephen King, or Michael Chabon, or Louise Erdrich…without any of those writers’ involvement in any way.
Or a novel by Joyce Maynard.
A search revealed yesterday that seven of my books have been scanned—illegally, without procuring rights—into an AI database for the purpose of creating AI simulations of my voice.
The Authors’ Guild, of which I am a member, is pursuing legal action, as is a consortium of writers.
Meanwhile, you can google “AI assistance for writers” and find dozens of platforms promising to make it possible for aspiring writers to create books , without the need of all those pesky skills like grammar, sensitivity to style, rhythm, language, tone or an understanding of dialogue. The technology can take care of all that. Leaving patrons of the AI assistance sites free to concern themselves with nothing more than typing in their ideas and no doubt offering up a charge card number.
I do not need to tell you how I feel about this. It’s nothing less than the death of art. My parents, who raised my sister and me on the literature of the Western canon, would die, themselves, if they weren’t long dead already.
There is so much more to be said about all of this, but I’ve got a day filled with writing ahead of me. Real writing. Not typing instructions into an AI site. I’m talking about what I’ve been doing for fifty years now, getting up at five am and putting in long days at my desk, considering every syllable, every sentence, the placement of every comma and period, the sound of the words I choose. ( Reading them out loud , alone at my desk, to hear how they sound.)
There will be those who offer up all kinds of reasons why AI can be a good thing for us all. Have at it. In the world of art and music and literature, it can mean only one thing: The eradication of what is uniquely human in each of us. The death of what is most precious and beautiful, the soul and spirit with which we were born. That is irreplaceable.
