Predictions are risky for columnists, but I will venture one anyway: In the near future, all fiction manuscripts will have to pass through an artificial intelligence detector before they are published. This will not happen easily, but it will happen. There have simply been too many scandals in which authors are suspected of submitting AI-written work, most recently the winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing.
I won’t parse the arguments that AI detection is flawed, except to say they aren’t very convincing. Nor do I think the head-in-the-sand approach that many institutions have taken can be sustained for much longer. Much of the literary world is in denial about the implications of so much AI work making its way into the highest echelons of literary achievement. But eventually, we are going to have to decide where AI writing belongs, and where it does not.
Even more than that, writers are going to have to decide what writing is for.
For a writer like me, there is something baffling about submitting an AI story to a fiction contest. I’ve been writing almost compulsively since I was 8 years old, when I inscribed my first attempt at a novel in a black-and-white composition book. What is the point of competing for a writing prize if you don’t actually want to write? Why would you seek honors that rightfully belong to your ChatGPT subscription?
But I am not actually that naive. I understand that writers write for many reasons, not just because we love doing the work. Much of the time, we don’t love doing the work. A common joke in my profession is that no one likes writing itself. We like being about to write and having written.
The joke is an exaggeration — almost nothing feels as good as the delirious fog of creation that envelops you when the work is going well. Often, however, the work does not go well, and you spend hours slogging through pieces or chapters that refuse to come together. There is a reason for journalist Mary Heaton Vorse’s famous observation that “the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” The dividing line between amateurs and professionals is often not talent, but the ability to pin our posteriors in place until something publishable emerges from our keyboards.
We stay in those chairs for many reasons: because we have a story that demands to be written, because we have ideas or knowledge we want to share, because we think we can change the world or at least one mind. But if we’re honest, we also write because we need money to support our other hobbies, such as eating or taking out 30-year mortgages. And of course, we enjoy the prestige.
It is much more fun to tell people that you are a writer than it is to tell them you are an IT consultant or an administrative assistant. It is enjoyable to get invitations for talks and conferences. It is delightful to have a wide audience for your thoughts, rather than forcing them upon the narrow circle of your friends and family. It is truly lovely when someone comes up to you and says, “I like your work.”
If you enjoy doing the work itself, AI is a poor substitute. But if you mostly enjoy the perks, it’s tempting to take shortcuts.
That kind of cheating will ultimately destroy literary prizes and perhaps traditional publishing. Why would anyone bother reading the product of your ChatGPT prompts when they can get a $20 subscription and compose their own? But for the individual cheater, it might work out well — at least, as long as judges and editors refuse to check. So after much agonized debate, I expect they will start running all submissions through Pangram or some other AI detector.
That will still leave the writing profession badly exposed to AI. Many people will happily slurp up bulk-generated AI fiction and journalism rather than the slow, expensive, artisanal human stuff. We can protest that real writing needs the ineffable human essence, but the people who read for plot and familiarity rather than novelty and prose styling are unlikely to heed our cries. So we should expect our profession to become even less lucrative and prestigious than it is now.
We’re not the only ones facing this dilemma. Social media is filled with software engineers having an existential crisis, wondering what’s left of the skills they spent decades building. I can’t answer for the engineers, but I think I can for the writers: What’s left is the work itself.
The age of AI will disrupt the workplace in all sorts of ways. But the work will continue, as other kinds of work have continued through technological disruptions. People still run the 100-meter dash, even though a car or a cheetah could do it faster. We still cook elaborate dinners, even though the frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes. We still have dinner parties, even though we could stream wittier banter from Netflix — because we are humans, and we want to seek excellence, not just consume it. AI may make it harder for us to get paid for our work. But if so, it will also make it easier for us to focus on the reasons that work is worth doing.
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