If you’re not from the north of England I’m referring to AI – the hottest of hot topics as I write. Apparently, it’s going to replace everybody and ruin everything. Maybe. It certainly will change the world in many ways but hopefully, we can use it for the better and do useful things with it.
Authors are naturally worried that they will be out of their jobs once AI works out how to write novels in minutes and makes us all redundant. It is already starting to try – or rather there are people out there who are using it to do that. Amazon is aware and always asks us to state if we’ve used AI when publishing a book. I like to think our readers will notice the difference.
I liken it to a situation I had in a previous life as a wedding photographer. At university, I studied, amongst other things, Digital Image Processing, and became a professional photographer just as digital cameras were taking off. Of course, all the established film photographers were up in arms and upset about it, which was understandable, but what did most of them do? They adapted and became successful digital photographers. The art was the same, just with different tools.
Thing is, we humans are storytellers, for good or for bad, and we will continue to want to hear real stories from people we can relate to, about characters that maybe we can or can’t relate to but get excited to hear tales of. I can’t imagine AI can come up with the same kind of ideas and concepts that humans will find fascinating. Maybe I’m wrong.
Also, from the writer’s point of view, is the creativity involved in writing a story. It scratches an itch to make something that other people will be interested in and will thank you for writing (and even pay for!). It’s not something that we will want to stop doing anytime soon and I will never use AI to write books, paragraphs, or passages in my novels.
It will have its uses in marketing, however. Some people are already using AI to design covers, although there is a debate about the copyright of those that still remains unanswered. Audiobooks using AI are here to stay but are not yet as good as the real thing. I think there will just be a niche for cheaper books with AI voices.
At the moment I can only envisage using it to help give me ideas for adverts for Facebook, Amazon etc., but that’s it.