Who’d choose, knowingly, to read novels written by an AI incapable of imagination?
Or essays on the human condition by a robot that can’t share our dreams and dreads?
Or poems of forsaken lovers by a loveless machine?
Or…
The ultimate reality will be this: Many people will lose their jobs due to AI. Many people will find a job related to AI. Doesn’t make for a good story, does it? Too nuanced. But it’s one as old as time.
Those two seemingly conflicting predictions are the opposite sides of the same coin. A coin that’s flipped in the air every time a world-shaking innovation steers our society into a new direction we didn’t predict. Sometimes, the coin takes its time to land. It’s in the meantime that either one side or the other dominates the conversation; “it will land heads!” “No, tails.” “No, definitely heads!” That’s us now. Endlessly arguing about a question that time will dissipate into nothing.
The capricious coin, like life, happens to be unfair. However we toss it, it always falls on its edge. In a way, both heads and tails are right; AI will kill and create jobs, just like so many inventions before. When the coin lands, the debate is over; the world has changed. In time, we adapt to our undecided fate. In time, our emotional reaction to both the heated discussions and the subsequent paradigmatic shifts are turned into an echo only to be found in history books.
It’s happened, like I said, since the dawn of time.
It happened with writing. Orators lost the baton that directed the listeners’ minds to authors who flourished while hiding behind their desks. But we can still hear Socrates—even if not a historically accurate one—through the writing of Plato. It happened with the printing press. Scribes who devoted their lives to the art and craft of copying manuscripts gave up their talents while repetitive mechanical devils replaced their work with soulless skill, allowing the pleb, in turn, to have unprecedented access to books. It happened with typewriters. They eliminated the need for quills to then be replaced by modern digital companions we now carry in our bags or pockets.
We lose some. We win some.
We mourn and grieve what we lose if it’s dear to us but are instead obliviously grateful for what we win in exchange. Quite a selfish way to judge the dreaded coin, don’t you think? But humans, in contrast to AI, are selfish. So I, unapologetic, ask this: Will it be true for AI? Can we make it not true? Will AI bring some unimaginable treasure we fail to envision now? Aren’t we in our right to get high on our hatred and hostility as pawns of a war we didn’t ask for?
I linger in the hope that the common factor among all the other inventions I just mentioned—the human user—cannot be replaced satisfactorily. “This time it’s different,” I say to myself with a tone that sounds more confident than I am. And it sure seems different; AI thinks for us. That’s not like past creative tools, isn’t it? We can’t be “outthought”. That’s our strength, our edge. But we can’t be sure. I’m not sure. Or the hairs on the back of my neck wouldn’t stand up at the thought of what’s coming.
I want to see the good, however faint it may seem to me now, among the bad. But it’s hard. It’s hard because writing, as I—we—do it today, is dear to me. Just like copying manuscripts by hand was to scribes. Like talking was to Socrates. Like quills were to 17th-century intellectuals and typewriters to 20th-century typists. We can’t understand it, but that was their whole life. And the future took it from them.
I, a writer of the 21st century, don’t want to lose my life. Even if I can see, with defiance product of an eternal recurrence that betrays its own intentions, that this poison-laced gift would be welcomed by our distant heirs, who, detached from our customs and our commons while immune to the very illness that’s taking us out, will be grateful for our sacrifice.
Living through the metamorphosis of the present; feeling how it breaks the chrysalis to be reborn as something entirely different is an ecstatic, almost mad-inducing experience. It’s nostalgia for a present that slips through my fingers.
I look forward and see a manifold of superimposed universes, each more likely to materialize than the next, and I feel an intense necessity—almost a survival instinct—to prepare; to embrace change and let it flow through me.
In some of those universes—those we left behind in forgotten bifurcations—writing never happened. In others, scribes managed to fight Gutenberg successfully; you and I wouldn’t be here. In others, still the crossroads lying ahead, AI finds a wall and never masters creativity like we did.
In others, perhaps the darkest of them all, AI will become the last and only writer. It’s in those universes that our story begins with a word and, like it happens with the best novels you want to never end, in a sad cycle-closing moment—when the flowers will wither, the songbirds will fall silent and our pencils will stop tearing the paper in unintelligible scribbles—a last word will end it.
The saddest realization to me is that although this last one could materialize—we could lose writing like we’ve lost so many other crafts, related or not to language and words—we’d forget that we ever cared. It’d happen like the slow fading of conscience; unbearable pain and sadness—and then, suddenly, silence. Gone. Like scribes of the 21st century, our children won’t care that we once wrote words.
Until that happens, I resist it. I resist the inevitable because resistance, in and of itself, has a role to play. It’s pride. It’s hope. And it’s the possibility of slowing down a future I reject as undesirable. The pain of those we left behind in time immemorial is our pain. I squirm at the loss of the monopoly of writing and creativity just like they wept at the disappearance of craftsmanship we no longer recognize as such. The feeling, if not the object of our suffering, is mutual.
Until that happens, I fight. I fight because being aware of this bittersweet insight that history provides time and again, doesn’t make me less of a warrior to protect what I don’t want to lose today. Because who else, if not me, will fight for what I hold dear? If the forces of destiny want to take it from us, let them try—but by no means will I willingly give it to them what they’ve come here to take away.
Openai now generates about 100 billion words per day. All people on earth generate about 100 trillion words per day.
That was Sam Altman in one of his many tweets the week before releasing Sora.
AI, 0.1%; humans, 99.9%. Not bad. A bit bad when you recall that not long ago humans were 100%. Very bad when you realize that 0.1% is large. Large. And growing.
Growing into 1%, then 10%, then 50%. Then 99.9%.
I don’t know for certain if we’re heading toward that bleak, dry universe where the tides have turned and human writing—even human creativity as a whole—is fighting to remain just above a sad 0.1%. But I do know that you, like me, can—if ever a tiny amount—steer the path of our collective future somewhere else.
As Altman likes to say when he’s not aggrandizing the visions of his preferred timeline, “You can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.” Let’s not give him the benefit of getting, without resistance, his trillion-word pile of AI-generated text.
Can one billion ChatGPT-generated words be compared in some meaningful dimension with just one word that a human created, with intent, on any happy day? I don’t care—as we get lost in a labyrinth of semantics, the amount of data spat out by AI systems grows relentlessly. That’s the only truth that matters now.
Let’s use that world-bending power we wield to not go where we don’t want to.
Let’s find ways to not yield under the pressure of forces we can’t control.
Let’s make the right choice even when we don’t have a choice.
Let’s fight by doing our best writing because who would want, among the many possible futures that lie ahead, to live in a world where humans don’t write anymore?
