I’ve been following the rise of AI in creative fields the same way I followed the spread of COVID in March of 2020. Every time I refresh the page, hoping for good news, I just find something infinitely worse than I was expecting. Of particular interest has been the lawsuit brought against OpenAI by Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and many others for infringing on their copyright and using their novels to train ChatGPT. It’s one of many similar lawsuits, none of which seem to be producing encouraging results yet. And who can forget the time Clarkesworld was forced to close their submissions window early thanks to a flood of shitty AI-generated submissions proffered by charlatans hoping to make a quick buck? Which of course led to every literary magazine, including my own, adding a clause to their submissions guidelines that if you submit AI-generated work, you can and will be blacklisted with zero remorse.
So imagine my dismay when I stumbled this afternoon across a writing-related scientific study titled: “Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content.” If you want to read the study in full, you can find it here. It’s…horrifying.
The basic premise is this: A team of researchers asked participants to write an eight-sentence story against a given prompt, which was then evaluated by a separate group of participants on how creative, well-written, enjoyable, original, and publishable the story was, among other traits. One third of the “writers” were only allowed to use their own faculties, one third were allowed to use one three-sentence AI-generated summary to inspire their story, and one third were allowed to choose from up to five AI-generated summaries.
The research team found that “access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable” and “with generative AI, writers are individually better off.” They wrote (with the statistical bits omitted), “stories written by writers with access to generative AI ideas are more enjoyable […] are more likely to have plot twists […] are considered to be better written […] and be less boring.” Essentially, their findings were that those stories influenced by AI were all-around better.
If, like me, you read that and your bullshit meter immediately went off, turns out you have to read over halfway through the study before getting to a very important bit: “Writers were not selected based on prior writing skills or their creativity,” and “Participants [evaluators] were not selected on the basis of prior experience in the publishing industry.” Both their writing- and evaluating-participants were selected from a database of people willing to be research participants, with no regard to their knowledge of or ability to create or judge creative writing.
If you’ve been here a while or have ever met me, you know how sacred I hold the mantle of “writer,” or really any creative title. It’s a learned craft into which people pour their time, their effort, their very souls. It’s not just words on a page, it’s psychology and story structure, prosody and poeticism. But this is all old hat. (Or, if it’s not, go check out some of my other newsletters.) These researchers had the audacity to write, “if the exercise related to drawing a picture, perhaps generative AI ideas would not be as effective for individuals with little experience with drawing (as opposed to writing where most people have experience with the task).”
BRB, internally screaming.
Society doesn’t value writers, a fact that’s painfully obvious in the widespread elimination of full-time writing jobs, in the pennies people want to pay for freelance writing, in the publishing industry’s focus on self-published novels with an already built-in audience, in the vast amount of subpar literature available (and popular), in the dying print industry, in the blatant lack of journalistic integrity. This study highlighted that fact in sharp relief, and the absolute contempt for writers within its pages is honestly astounding.
Had this study been solely about creativity, as it alleged to be, it would have been a little bit ethically gray, but overall interesting. By taking the leap to calling its participants “writers” and asserting in its findings that “having access to generative AI causally increases the average novelty and usefulness—two frequently studied dimensions of creativity—relative to human writers on their own” and “having access to generative AI ‘professionalizes’ the stories beyond what writers might have otherwise accomplished alone,” they begin to make claims far beyond the bounds of their research, with insidious implications.
Here’s the thing—which I hope is obvious to you, but wasn’t obvious to these researchers or anyone who reviewed this study, so I don’t know what to believe anymore—stories aren’t written by random ass people pulled off the street. I know. Shocking revelations all around. Stories are written by writers, people who, hopefully, know something about how to craft good stories and write them with good prose. The same way brain surgery isn’t performed by some guy you found on the subway. The same way we’re not sending Jill from accounting into outer space. The same way you’re not trusting an unqualified total stranger to watch your kids for the weekend. It’s almost like people specialize in professions and then actually do them well. What a thought!
The result of this study, when you boil it down, is that having creative prompts helps uncreative people create creative things. I’m 98% sure they could have repeated the experiment with a list of prompts from Pinterest instead of AI-generated prompts and produced the same results. It’s not about AI, not really. But isn’t that a nice buzzword! Had they recreated this experiment with actual writers, I’m 100% sure their findings would have been completely different.
By not specifying at the beginning of the study that this was solely a study on creative idea generation and had nothing at all to do with people who write real books, these researchers have published a scientific study that claims that real human writers are not as good at writing stories as ChatGPT.
Let that sink in.
There is a very real chance that this study or future ones like it will be used as proof—by publishing houses, by marketing firms, by CEOs and hiring managers—that we don’t need writers. ChatGPT doesn’t only write well enough, it actually writes better than humans.
The dystopia (almost) writes itself.
Art is what makes us human. Fiction—good fiction—broadens the horizons of what we believe to be possible, imbues us with empathy and gallantry, connects us across time and space to elevate our ineluctable humanity. AI can’t write that. AI can’t even come close to writing that. But I’m afraid the powers that be won’t realize that until we’ve lost it.
I will do everything I can to not let that happen, and I hope you’ll join me.
Read good books. Share good books. Tell your favorite author you love them. Buy their books. Boycott AI-generated art and writing. Support your local lit mag. Support your local artists and musicians and film festivals. Talk about ideas. Embrace the arts. And most of all, don’t take shitty studies like this one at face value, and argue with anyone who does.
Keep on fighting the good fight.
Stay excellent,
Kristen
On a more positive note, here are a few of my recent five-star reads that I would absolutely recommend: Loot by Tania James, Funny Story by Emily Henry, and All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater. Three kickass novels by kickass women in wildly different genres.
The Lit Nerds continues to publish good short fiction (in my very biased opinion), and you should totally go read it to renew your faith in humanity.
I recently watched The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Netflix, which was absolutely delightful in every possible way. The colors, the pacing, the narration, the set design, the performances… chef’s kiss.
If you need a snack while taking in all this great non-AI generated media, I made these cookies for my volleyball team and got some of the best responses to any baked goods I’ve ever made. I used extra cinnamon swirl and added some chopped toasted pecans, and they were heaven.
Featured image by Rock’n Roll Monkey on Unsplash
Earthbound, But Aspiring 