Paying A.I. to Live Your Dreams
A.I. ain’t going away, but we don't need to be precious about it.
Listen: Artificial intelligence isn’t going away.
I get it.
The tech is here.
We know.
I’m starting with that because, wildly, that seems to be the first defense people throw down when you say that A.I. might suck for a lot of people. “Well, artificial intelligence already exists, so you have to live with it” is a beautifully incomplete thought from dazzlingly unserious people. Artificial intelligence isn’t the weather. A.I. models may be large and it may be impossibly complicated, but they are not some foreign objects whose use is outside of our control or understanding. They weren’t invented by magic and marketed by the Force.
But, to be clear, I don’t think A.I. is scary. If I did, I’d do what I do when I’m scared of anything: Become a total suck up coward. That’s my natural state. A quivering mass of anthropomorphized buckling. I just think A.I. will make a lot of people’s lives shittier. As I wrote somewhere else (somewhere beautiful!), artificial intelligence certainly won’t kill all creative jobs in the near future. It’ll just make a lot of creative jobs suck. Corporations will be able to automatically crank out a work and pay a creative person less to “fix” it, even if that means a complete top-to-bottom re-do. Music, writing, art, you name it. The shit A.I. puts out right now is too awful to survive on its own outside of the novelty itself. But companies can sure make a good profit if they use it for first drafts!
Yes, there are good things A.I. can and will be used for - including things I’m sure I don’t expect or don’t think are very good. I could very well be completely wrong. My biggest certainty in life is that I’m a piece of shit. I’d love to live in a world in which I’m wrong all the time. I’m not right all the time - don’t get me wrong - but I am wrong a lot of the time if you get me right. See? I can vomit incoherent bullshit without the help of an app!
A.I. can be a fun, experimental toy. I don’t think it’s a wave of evil. I don’t think it’s going to be SkyNet. If I genuinely thought A.I. was going to destroy the human race, I’d be more for it than against it.
What I do feel relatively sure of, however, is that a lot of the creative A.I. being marketed right now is a con. The apps are real, the promises behind them are not. And while that is not scary for me personally, it is fucking annoying as hell.
There’s one particular app that blew up online this week called Sudowrite. Their sales pitch is that A.I. can help co-write your short story or novel or novella or long short story. You put in a description, it can pitch you an outline. You put in an outline, it can pitch you characters and story arcs. You put in the characters and story arcs, it can write chapters for you. They say it’s a tool for writers who don’t like the writing process. I mean no malice there - that is literally part of the marketing.
But promises that “YOU CAN BE AN ARTIST TOO!” aren’t new. Especially for writing, one of the most accessible ways to create art. It’s not an easy way to create art - none is - but in terms of the barrier of entry, stringing words together to form a thought is a relatively cheap option. In fact, writing is so cheap that any of us - me included - could begin writing a novel today. Right now. You could close this page and open one of four or five different built-in apps on almost any device and just go. Even to me, a bitter man who’s going to be happiest as the last ghost of a breath escapes my collapsing lungs, there’s something special in the idea that anyone can write.
Unfortunately, the problem is that a lot of people hate the writing part of writing. Because, well, it does suck. It’s tedious. It’s boring. When you’re in a bad mood, you don’t want to do it. When you’re in a good mood, you don’t want to do it. You’re tired. You’re awake. It’s too early. It’s too late. Hell, even when I’m thrilled to be writing, my brain begs us to stop every five minutes and go play more Legend of Zelda.
Anyone can write, but being able to write at a high level is the work. Just like anyone can play basketball, but being able to play basketball at a high level is the work. When someone says they wish they were a professional athlete, they’re not thinking about the year-round workouts, intense dieting, and unending scrutiny. They’re thinking it would be fun to slam dunk a basketball on television and then fuck an attractive person at a fancy party.
That’s kind of what Sudowrite is selling. But nobody is going to fuck you.
To be fair, the basic idea behind Sudowrite is no different than the thousands of human-made books and seminars charging people money with the promise that they’ll become successful writers the easy way. What this “easy way” is changes from seminar to book to machine learning autofill app. It can be a surefire narrative worksheet. A breakdown showing on which page each scene must occur in a screenplay. It’s all made to seem like there’s a secret password other creatives don’t want you to have. They’re successful because they’re hiding the ball from you!
Side note, I’m not talking about writing groups or classes. There’s a difference between learning to write a workable sitcom script over eight weeks and taking a two-hour seminar that tries to give you a shortcut to SELLING YOUR SCRIPT NOW. There’s a difference between consulting with friends about your work and paying an A.I. app to point out perceived narrative problems with an automatic suggested fix. One is trying to help you do your work, the other is trying to get someone to do your work for you.
Sudowrite is far closer to that than it is a threat to me. My own inability to take care of myself or regularly update this Substack is more of a threat to me. Depression and despair and Taco Bell are more of a threat to me. Like scam book agents that promise to help you succeed if you pay them upfront, this Sudowrite shit just pisses me off.
Because it’s lying to people who want to be creative. It’s telling them that if they pay enough money, they can be writers without having to write. It’s convincing people that the valuable part of writing a book is the end product and the end product alone. As long as you can slap your name on it, does it really matter how much of it you wrote? Instead of putting up a victory banner because you won something, you’re putting up a victory banner because you paid for a victory banner and want people to see how nice your victory banner is. It’s not get-rich-quick so much as get-credit-for-doing-something-cool-quick.
And a lot of these same people are going to be real fucking disappointed. Because if you’re paying for an app that automatically makes you do words gooder, you aren’t just writing for yourself. You’re not doing it for the love of the game or you wouldn’t be trying to game the game. You’re paying money to have a computer write and punch-up prose because you want other people to like “your” work, pay for “your” work, and praise “your” work. You’re buying a ticket because you want the train to go somewhere.
Which seems great, except every other person paying for this service also thinks they’re going to be the ones who jump ahead in line. Sure, a few will spend a little to fuck around and just see what funny text pops out. But if you’re paying the $100 monthly tier for Sudowrite, you’re doing it because you expect it to pay dividends. In all likelihood, it won’t. Saying it was co-written by A.I. won’t help it sell. Hiding that it was co-written by A.I. only shows you’re afraid you can’t succeed without someone doing the work for you.
For a lot of people - and certainly customers of A.I. software that mimics creativity - there is no desire to be creative. There is a desire to be seen as creative, but not to actually be creative. You want to say you made a painting and don’t really give a shit if you paid someone else to do it. Hell, the music industry has thrived on this philosophy for decades. Throw someone a tiny bit of money to write a song, legally take the credit, and profit when it’s a success. And, no, it’s not different just because you gave the songwriter a “prompt” for the song.
But here too there’s going to be disappointment. Like I said, people who love basketball can go outside and play basketball right now. Being a basketball player isn’t about being good. It’s about just playing basketball. Playing the game is what matters. It doesn’t count as playing if you have someone lift you eight feet in the air while they help you get the bouncy ball through the colorful hoop. Even if you claim that being lifted in the air and having the game played for you is your “method.”
That’s how mad this shit makes me. Sports metaphors. Can you fucking imagine?
Again, I do believe there are and will be good uses for A.I. I also know that any technological advance brings with it change. People will lose jobs. People will gain jobs. There will be positive and negative ramifications we do not expect. Although if I hear another person compare art and A.I. to horses and cars again, I’m going to lose my fucking mind. Art isn’t a horse or a gaslamp in Victorian England. The fact I have to talk about art in the grandiose sense makes me just as mad as that sports metaphor.
Getting sold grift-heavy shortcuts by other failed creatives is a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme. We all want to be rock stars in our own way. We all want to be celebrated. We all want to live our dreams. But if you’re paying someone or something to do the work for you, you’re not writing. You may be editing. You may be prompting. You may have a great idea for a story that would completely work if it wasn’t for all the work. But you’re still not writing.
You’re just a sucker with a wallet and dreams you’d rather not have to live yourself.
Thank you, Mike. I needed this today. I'm an author with a writing day job that's required me to edit "spun" content many times in the past. These tools have been around for a while. They're not useful for much outside of wowing SEO guys who are impressed by walls of text. It's very annoying to see that hype leak out into the wider world.