How I Know that AI Won’t Replace Fiction Writers

<p>A couple of years ago a friend (and fellow novelist) joined Ninja Writers, my online writing school. He wanted to participate in one of our feedback workshops.</p> <p>Basically &mdash; in these workshops everyone brings some of their work. They take turns reading out loud and getting feedback from the other writers in the Zoom room.</p> <p>He participated a couple of times and I finally had to talk to him, privately. The gist of that conversation was something along the lines of &mdash; Dude, what in the hell is this?</p> <p>His writing was strange. Hollow. I couldn&rsquo;t quite put my finger on it, but it was&nbsp;<em>shallow</em>&nbsp;somehow. All the parts were there, but it lacked depth. He got feedback along those lines every week, but brought back similar writing the next time.</p> <p>Of course, people are at different points in their writing careers. And I wasn&rsquo;t judging him. In fact, Ninja Writers was designed for new writers. It&rsquo;s just that I could tell something was off, but I couldn&rsquo;t figure out what it was.</p> <p>We were friends, so I could ask the&nbsp;<em>dude, what the hell&nbsp;</em>question of him in a way that I wouldn&rsquo;t have asked a student. His answer was: AI wrote it and he wanted to see if he could make it pass a group of readers.</p> <p>It took me about half an hour to understand what he was talking about. This was well before ChatGBT was a thing. I&rsquo;d never heard of AI writing a novel before. Or fiction at all.</p> <p>But he&rsquo;d bought a program or an app or something. I can&rsquo;t remember now what it was, except that he fed it ideas and it spit out stories. He told me that I needed to learn how to do it, too, because pretty soon I&rsquo;d be out of a job. But I knew, right in that moment, that he was wrong.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-i-know-that-ai-wont-replace-fiction-writers-2f6aeabc5320"><strong>Visit Now</strong></a></p>