I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence – but we are as valuable as ever

I recently heard an exchange at a playground that should worry the executives at AI companies more than any analyst’s prediction of a bubble. A boy and a girl, maybe 10 years old, were fighting. “That’s AI! That’s AI!” the girl was shouting. What she meant was that the boy was indulging a new and particular breed of nonsense: language that sounds meaningful but has no connection to reality. The children have figured the new world out quickly, as they do.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay, neither as an apocalypse nor as the solution to all life’s problems, but as a disruptive tool. The recent scandal over Shy Girl, the novel by Mia Ballard, was doubly revealing. Hachette cancelled its publication amid claims it was reliant on AI generation (Ballard has said that an acquaintance who edited the self-published version used AI, not her). But the book was originally self-published. Apparently readers and editors didn’t mind until the use of AI was pointed out to them.

The fact that machines can generate meaning in the first place is an existential curiosity. But for writers, and for young writers in particular, AI has a more practical significance. A recent survey found that 86% of college students use AI regularly, which means that 14% are lying to survey-takers. The ordinary business of quotidian language – writing student essays, emails, memos, all the granular sentence-by-sentence work that once trained writers in their craft – is dissolving. Mastery of style, the laborious gift of the skilled writer, is being automated.

To read the full article on theguardian.com, click here