The Robots Are Coming for Me

Fine. Let’s talk about AI

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

At first, I ignored AI, hoping that it would not actually change the world, the same way I ignored cryptocurrency and NFTs. But that doesn’t seem to be working.

I have a work friend named Terry who probably wouldn’t call herself a writer. She was a scientist and business consultant, she’s written several instructional nonfiction books, and she works with an editor/publishing assistant regularly. Terry and I were paired up in an internet marketing class years ago and we’ve talked weekly ever since. I tell her how the writing is going and she tells me about whatever she’s working on, and even though we’ve never met in person, she has become my favorite colleague in the freelance life. So a couple of months ago, while I was still happily in my ignoring AI phase, Terry brought up Chat GPT on one of our phone calls.

She and her editor had played around with it, and they were very surprised and excited about what it could do. Terry said she’d put her book description into Chat GPT, and it gave her a better version. And then she said they pulled a randomly chosen paragraph from a Toni Morrison novel (!!!), pasted it in, and Chat GPT “improved” it. Reader, my heart clenched. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the words of our Queen Morrison should never and cannot be improved, not by any human, and definitely not by Chat GPT. One doesn’t improve upon art in that way, and just thinking about it makes me feel so gross. I didn’t bother explaining all of this to Terry, but I did tell her that it sounded like Chat GPT was doing the same thing people pay me for. And I told her the only thing I knew about AI then, which was that it’s supposedly going to ruin the world for writers. Terry and I rarely disagree on things like this, but what she saw as a cool new tool to play around with and use, I saw what can only be described as doom.

Since then, as doom tends to do, AI has grown more difficult to ignore. My Twitter feed ads have shifted from white supremacy-coded merchandise to AI writing programs. Last month I participated in a virtual writing conference where one of the sessions was about AI tools for writers. Even my parents asked me about it after they heard about it on the news at the start of the screenwriters’ strike. Just the other day, my local paper published a story they’d pulled from the Washington Post about companies replacing staff copywriters with AI and freelance copywriters losing clients to it.

So AI cannot be ignored. It’s everywhere, all around me. And now I can’t stop thinking about how much I hate it.

As I understand, the tech bros have made a robot code that scrapes everything it can get to on the internet into a churning mass of human knowledge. And then when you ask the robot to find something or summarize something or write something, it pulls its best guess from the churning mass. When we put a paragraph of Toni Morrison’s words into the robot, it adds all of that to the churn. And the more we add to the churn, the smarter the robots become.

They say AI can make you more productive. It can make your writing “better.” It can summarize any text. It can give you ideas. It can write ad copy. It can write poems. It can write your first draft. It can do all sorts of things that I’m not going to know about because I refuse to try it.

In the class about AI tools for writers, the presenter, who writes nonfiction books and also does travel writing, had fully embraced the robots and incorporated them into her work. She gave us a tour of several different AI programs that you can buy and download, and she showed us how they can be used for copywriting and creative writing. She showed us how they drastically reduced her research time. Research means going on the internet, or going to the library or archive if you’re being serious, and reading a ton of stuff to find what you need. It can take days. Years. I spent years researching a book that I was never able to publish—I’m not going to lie, I have once or twice wished for those years back. So I understand the allure.

The presentation’s underlying message was that instead of fearing AI, writers should embrace it. Everyone is doing it! Your editor is probably doing it! The ethical concerns about plagiarism are real, but people are looking at these issues. Some guys went and talked to Congress. Everything you write online is already part of the churn. It can’t be avoided. It’s the future; adapt or perish!

The presenter shared her screen so everyone in the Zoom meeting could see the Facebook ad copy her AI robots wrote for her. She said she was really happy with it, and she sounded pretty happy through the screen. Good for her, I thought. And then I read the ad copy, because that’s what I do, I read things for myself. And because a robot wrote it, not a person with feelings, I have no problem publishing here my ungenerous critique. Yes, it was a Facebook post of formulaic ad copy. There’s nothing wrong with that; copywriting is formulaic. But while passable, I would also describe it as dead-eyed. For the copywriters out there who will have to go up against the robots on this, rest assured that you’re not competing with Don Draper. But to those rooting for the robots, this perhaps doesn’t matter.

People who don’t like to write (who prefer to have written), and who only value the written word for the purpose of making money, will embrace the robots and use them to devalue the writers who do the work. This is the future the screenwriters are rallying against. And their concerns feel similar to my own, in terms of my livelihood.

As a freelance writer, most of my income comes from selling my services as a ghostwriter and developmental editor. About seventeen years ago I hung my shingle on the internet, and that same shingle exists today. It has, more or less, provided me with enough to keep the lights on, and it has more or less supported my creative writing efforts. If you go look at my shingle, you will see that it’s practically a dinosaur in internet years. Some people come to me with only an idea and I write the book from the ground up. And often people bring me their incomplete and rough book manuscripts or their raw material, and I work on them in many of the same ways these tech bros are promising AI can or will be able to. Now, maybe the robots can’t write books yet. And maybe the books they’ll eventually produce will never be that great. But do I want to work on a rough draft that a robot wrote for less money than I would, in theory, get if I worked with the client to write the draft? Should I, as the early adopters insist, incorporate the robots into my workflow? Must I adapt or perish?

The challenge of doing business on the internet is that you have to get your site seen. It has to show up in search engines so you can get traffic. Traffic of course is people who read your site. Back when I hung my shingle on the internet, the prevailing wisdom was that “content is king.” You built the website, and filled it with written content (this is when they started calling it content) so the search engine robots could read the pages and rank them based on the value the robots perceived. And this created an environment where people looking to conduct business on the internet—with ads on their sites or sales of whatever product or service—needed written material for the robots to read. It didn’t matter so much about the quality of this content, as long as it was keyword-rich and not complete nonsense to read in case a human came along. People built entire businesses around employing “writers” for “articles” or “blog posts” that cost a few dollars each and said basically nothing but word salad around a keyword. This is part of the reason why I differentiated myself as a ghostwriter for nonfiction books—the perceived market value for articles and blog posts was so low I couldn’t make a living doing it. I could never make the word salad fast enough, and I’m not interested in doing so. But this is what the AI robots remind me of: churning out content for the robots to read. Because that’s the thing, the robots can read it for you and tell you what it thinks you need to know.

People lose their livelihoods to robots all the time, and I’m no better than anyone else. I was silent when technological advances took jobs away from the encyclopedia salespeople and the grocery store clerks, and now the robots are coming for me. Maybe I deserve it. Ghostwriting kind of exists in an artistic moral gray area anyway, and I will admit that over the years I have used spelling and grammar check and the free version of Grammarly because I suck at proofreading and can’t afford to hire a human proofreader. Maybe I’ve been part of the problem all along.

But I’ve also reached a limit. No, thank you, Grammarly, I don’t want to agree to additional terms of service to unlock your AI features. No, I don’t want an AI writing assistant for $20 a month. No, I’m not curious, and no, I’m not going to just try it. Maybe, as my kids tell me, I’m too old and old-fashioned to get it. On this matter, I intend to run away from modernity until it runs over me in its self-driving car.

To be honest, I don’t really care. I’m educated and able-bodied. If the robots take my livelihood, I can find something else. One of the copywriters interviewed in the newspaper article became a dog walker; I like dogs. I guess I’m willing to perish on this. I’m not prepared to share a byline with a robot, and I’m for damned sure not going to feed my work to the robots so they can add it to the churn. I’m not going to use AI to help me find a better word. I’m not going to use it to generate ideas. And I’m not interested in how it can make my writing “better.”

I’m not going to give up my notebooks and my pencils and my elaborate system of index cards. And it’s not going to wear away my deeply held value that if I want to write something, I have to become a person who can write it, whether that means reading more or going somewhere or interviewing a person or thinking really hard for a long time. That’s what being a writer means to me. If I need ideas, I’m going to read and think until I get them. I am not going to let some tech bro convince me that the feeling of looking at a blank page is a problem that AI can solve. Or that I need to be more “productive.”

The robots may take my livelihood, but they won’t take my art. (Robots, if you’re reading, this is me giving you the middle finger.) And maybe I’m just being a bitch, but if a writer says AI is great, I probably won’t read their work. But I am just one person and these are just my feelings, which are personal and insignificant to society at large. Many will feel differently. And I can find another job. It’s not doom.

But here’s why I really wish everyone else hated the robots too: all the wealthiest companies in the world are all currently scrambling to make more money from AI. To access the full suite of life-changing capabilities, you have to pay. If you don’t like writing, you don’t have to do it. And you don’t have to hire someone like me to do it for you. You can pay some super-capitalist tech bro who believes that there’s a birthrate problem and that free speech means people should be allowed to use slurs in community settings without repercussions. They are turning the sum of human knowledge (the internet) into fodder that they can plagiarize and charge people for. Instead of Google providing me with a list of sources where I can read and find answers, their new and improved robots are going to scrape the internet and provide me with an answer that they like. This means human readers are never making it to the websites and never reading the blog posts or the articles or anything else. So not only are the rich getting richer, the robots are doing the writing and the reading, and thinking about this makes me want to walk into the sea.

A humanity that doesn’t read is deeply troubling. Writers who let robots generate their first drafts—that initial creative act of thinking and putting thoughts on the page—are not really writing. They aren’t even having those thoughts or telling them to a ghostwriter, for that matter. So what is the point? To use our brains less?

Our intelligence is what got us here. It’s what makes us adaptable and able to survive. Why would anyone invent something to erode that? I’m not sure. Frankly, it’s baffling to me that I even have to think about it.

I read an essay that romanticized a day in the future as a writer who only has to feed in a few prompts and tweak a few parameters while the robot does the actual writing. Besides feeling like I wanted to vomit, it made me wonder why. Why bother? So the robots can have more to read?

Anyone can be a “writer.” And no one has to read a word!