Writing is a difficult exercise.
Or rather, writing was a difficult exercise.
Quill, pen, typewriter, computer, spell checker: all the technical barriers to writing have gradually disappeared.
But one remained.
Inspiration.
The idea. The “je ne sais quoi”. The author’s singularity.
That age-old creative effort, turning a fog of ideas into intelligible words and sentences.
But today and tomorrow, everything will be transformed.
What writer can stand up and say:
“This sentence, which I wrote, can never be re-invented by an AI”
No one.
Because AI digests everything, imitates everything, and spits everything back out.
Effortlessly.
With a single prompt, I can ask an AI to:
- Find me an idea to write about
- Write dozens of paragraphs on that idea
- Rephrase endlessly
Why would I bother writing what AI automates in a few seconds?
And on the reader’s side, it’s even worse.
For example:
I’m looking for an article on the best techniques for planting carrots in slightly sandy soil.
AI can write an article on the subject on the fly, specifically for me.
And if today that article may seem a bit hollow or misleading, with the exponential progress of the models, in a few years the article will be 100 times better than anything a human being could write.
Why?
Because AI will have digested every conflicting point of view on the question, every publication by agronomists, gardeners, market gardeners, to extract their substance, synthesize it and share it with me in a simple way.
Am I looking for a biography of Michael Jackson? A book on the Russian revolution as seen by a Romani child? An hour-by-hour account of the D-Day landings of June 1944?
AI will effortlessly offer me tailor-made content in a few seconds.
At the length I want, in the tone I want.
I bet that before long, we’ll be able to have a tailor-made book, one we “crafted” around our specific needs and wishes, delivered to us by mail.
What will remain beyond its grasp?
- Current events, which are by definition new
- Subjects no one will ever have written about, and therefore by definition of little interest
Here we are at the gates of a world where human writing will be drowned under billions of pieces of AI content.
And above all, billions of pieces of AI content of better quality.
It will be the end of many authors, and the end of writing in the broad sense.
I do, however, see a way out:
Creation is a cathartic necessity
This is how Alexandre Astier answered when asked whether authors were in danger because of AI:
For me, the job of an author is to express something sincere, something deep.
What moves me is knowing that a human created the work, sharing a conflict, a suffering, a past, a childhood. That makes the work untouchable.
For example, when Flaubert describes the hem of a dress, you can feel that he knows how one walks. Maupassant, when he talks about Rouen, doesn’t just say “Rouen with the roofs of its bell towers”, he speaks of “the pointed people of Gothic steeples”.
If an AI comes up with “the pointed people of Gothic steeples”, it doesn’t interest me, because it’s not a human.
A computer remains a set of switches, billions of them, granted, but it knows nothing of suffering, identity, survival, doubt or frustration.
And without considering myself an author, these few words resonated with me.
All my articles (and this one is one of them), I wrote because I felt a malaise, a frustration.
Because I had an almost pathological need to express myself, to formalize an idea, to raise my voice.
This article is for a curious mother-in-law, that one for an obtuse client, this one to take down a model, or that one to change our society.
And in the end, if no one read them, it mattered little to me: I had expressed what was holding me back.
I could move on.
At peace.
And that is something ChatGPT cannot give me.
By automating the creative act, it removes my efforts and puts my comfort out of reach.
As long as a human being feels an emotion, a pain, a frustration, they will need to express it.
And they will need to write, draw, build or, more broadly, create.
And through the very act of creation, through the efforts it demands of them, they will ease their tensions.
On the other side of the looking glass, however, it is far from certain that many Alexandre Astiers will be left to read these productions.
And illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, musicians will run into the same problems.
But that’s another story.
