The Factory of Stories
Everyone’s talking about the rise of AI, so I figured I might as well hop on this train. As an aspiring writer, I write stories and submit them to magazines in the hopes of having it published one day. During the last year or so, many of the magazines that I was submitting to put out warnings that they’re being flooded with AI-generated stories. Some even closed submissions for a while. AI (not without human assistance of course) is trying to take over the creative writing space.
Out of pure curiosity, I used ChatGPT 3.5 to generate three, thousand words long short stories. A high fantasy story, a science fiction one, and a horror story. All of the stories were pretty terrible. Telling not showing, a lot of unneeded exposition, and the stories just sounded empty and weird. Part of that could be because in two of the three stories there was no dialogue. At all. The high fantasy story had a grand total of two conversations and nine lines of dialogue.
So at least ChatGPT is pretty far from being a good replacement for authors. However, I did some more digging and stumbled upon an AI model that can “create human-like writing based on your own, enabling anyone, regardless of ability, to produce quality literature.” (The AI is called NovelAI.) Funny that they use the words “quality literature”, since I tried this AI, and what it generated was far from quality literature. That is probably because I used the free version that they offer. If you pay a monthly subscription (10–25$ a month) you can train the AI using your own (or anyone else’s) writing and it will adapt that style of writing. They even offer a selection of models that have already been trained to mimic the style of famous authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft. “Using AI Modules, you can draw upon specific themes, replicate famous writers, or even train one with your own data.” I can only wonder how powerful this AI can be when trained and used properly. Who knows, maybe AI made stories are already published somewhere, we just don’t know it.
I think this rise of AI in creative spaces is concerning. It’s harming artists who are making beautiful art and trying to share it with the world. But instead of being recognized, their art gets lost in the infinite landfill of AI generated content. Being an artist in any field is hard enough already, so I think machines joining the competition can and definitely will discourage people from making art.
This is happening in every creative space. AI is writing stories and plays, narrating Youtube videos, designing websites, drawing, making paintings, composing music, and even singing. In a world where AI is trying to take over creative spaces I can’t help but think how people used to imagine a world where machines were doing all the hard work and people got to make art all day. Now we seem to be heading towards a world where humankind is working away at menial jobs while machines make art for them.
