The US Supreme Court has decided that AI can use your writing to learn. But not use it without paying you. It will cost the AI farms the price of one copy. Writers are certain to be screaming about this already. The Authors Guild has been rearing back for a long fight. This week’s federal judge ruling sets the stage for this year’s legal showdown.
You can fight it if you want, or explore how AI might be able to help out. If you struggle with a first draft, you may be the kind of writer who wants to skip that struggle. You’re moving onward to the other struggles. Writing isn’t easy like ordering at the Starbucks window. Come to think of it, there are a lot of choices at that coffee counter, too.
No matter what, the machines still need us. Especially if you want your writing to have soul, sound like a human, and uncover connections no one published before. AI is not great at breaking ground, either in ideas or expression. It’s great a parroting, not copying. When that beaky bird says “Watch out for that,” you know it’s a parrot by the sound of the words.
What looks like a challenge might be an opportunity. If an author will work on revisions and breathing life into AI writing, it might be ready for an edit. AI+Edit could get some books written that would never surface in any other way. You could argue those books didn’t need to surface.
There’s a problem with that stance. Keep out the attempts at art and you are in the privilege business. You try to be a tastemaker when your ideal is keeping things out of circulation. Some people like reality TV. Nobody’s campaigning against it, and there are days when that TV feels like an overturned garbage truck. People like what they like.
I’m a fan of a new book, We Need Your Art. Its author is a historical novelist, but even more crucially, she looks at how to help us all create. Her manifesto is right up front in the book.
For a long time, I wanted to tell stories. But I held the shameful belief that making art was frivolous, irresponsible, and embarrassing—that I should probably keep my hopes to myself. Still, I wrote. And as I told my stories, something changed within me. Writing connected me to joy, to ambition, to rebellion and delight. These silly little stories were giving me purpose.
Anything that gives a human purpose is something to take to the hospice bed we’re all headed for. The money comes and goes, and protecting the repuatation of art feels like a mission for those who’ve already reached the ground of good commerce. It’s as if the confirmation of great sales is more important than saucy, potent storytelling.
I say, let the AI have its way with my words. I can’t really fight it, not any more than I can keep people from using language modeling to develop early drafts. I will say that you might do well to admit your work started in AI before I see it. Right now, AI is doing things that give it away, things an editor can find and repair. Writing is a collaborative enterprise. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Nobel-winning giant of a novelist. He also needed Edith Grossman to translate his work.
I want to live in a world that gives art every chance it can get. It that’s by way of machines, that’s not new. Literature classics written before personal computers stand alongside those drafted in Word and organized with Scrivener. What matters is how we preserve and promote the soul. That’s what gives writing purpose and meaning. Disclosure and policies will joust with means of expression. Your writing can be precious, no matter which tools are on writing tables. We need your art.
