In episode 154 of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns tackles a hot topic in the world of writing these days: artificial intelligence (AI).
Will AI writing soon replace human writing and should writers be fearful for the future of their livelihood? Find out in this episode!
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The Writing Coach Episode #154 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #154 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin t Johns here.
Now, let’s face it: completing the first draft of your book just might be the most difficult part of the entire publication journey. Emotional challenges, energy issues, loss of enthusiasm, a lack of productivity — I’ve seen it all, folks! And all of these things can easily send the creation of a first draft way off course. Plus, there’s undoubtedly micro-level writer’s craft details, techniques, and formulas you’re probably not executing on in your scene-to-scene writing (if you’re aware of them at all!). And that’s exactly why I created the FIRST DRAFT group coaching program, and I want you to be a part of it. The outcome of the program is simple: finish a first draft of your manuscript in six months or less, which reads like a third draft, and was actually fun to write. If that sounds good to you, I’m going to be opening the doors to the FIRST DRAFT program this week. Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/firstdraft, and you can get all of the details about the program.
Now, in today’s episode, we are tackling a big one here, a big scary thing, and that is the AI writing programs and software that have come out over the last couple years. Like you, I’m sure, a year or two ago I started hearing about chat GP and these other chat programs and AI writing things. And honestly, I, avoided it <laugh>, it sounded so awful to me. Replacing the human spirit with AI is . . . as a kid who grew up on Terminator 2 <laugh>, you know, this is the nightmare future James Cameron promised us. And it seems to have arrived.
There was a program, an AI image generation program called DALL*E mini, which I had a lot of fun playing with last year. It created these really weird, surreal images that I thought were so much fun because of how weird and clearly artificially generated it looked. That was like a year ago. And just in the year’s time, those AI image creation tools are now creating <laugh>, like amazing, perfect stuff.
I saw a video this week that it was an AI generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti <laugh>. And it looked horrible and horrific, but it looked horrible and horrific the way the images looked a year ago. And so already a year later, the video is where the images were last year. And that’s how fast this stuff is moving.
I knew as a writing coach, as a writer, at some point here, I was going to have to dive into this writing AI stuff. The kind of straw that broke the camel’s back was a client of mine. a great writer told me he’d lost a bunch of his copywriting work, and that his employer who kind of fired him or ended his contracts straight up just said, “Yeah, we’re, we’re replacing you with an AI. We’ve, we’ve got this AI that can write sales pages or website content or whatever, just as good as you can and for free, and can do it in, in seconds.”
When I heard that, when I started to hear about people I know losing work because of this AI, I was like, “Okay, I can’t really ignore this anymore. If, if people are going to not feed their families because the AI is doing the work for them, I kind of have to check this out.”
I headed over to ChatGPT, which is I think one of the main AIs, at least one of the main free writing Ais. And the way it works is you can kind of ask it questions. You can ask it to create something for you. What I asked the software was, “Should writers be afraid of being put out of work by ChatGPT?” And now this is the response I got directly from the AI:
As an AI language model, I cannot put writers out of work. While it’s true that AI technology has advanced significantly in recent years and has been used to generate certain types of content, such as news articles and sports reports, AI-generated content still cannot replace the creativity, originality, and style that human writers bring to their work.
AI-generated content is typically limited to certain types of writing, such as data-driven or formulaic writing, and is often used to supplement human-created content rather than replace it entirely. In fact, AI can even assist writers in their work, by providing suggestions and ideas, or by automating certain repetitive tasks.
So, while AI technology may change the way that writers work and the types of writing that are in demand, it is unlikely to replace human writers entirely. Writing is a complex and nuanced skill that requires creativity, critical thinking, and an understanding of language and human experience that AI cannot fully replicate.
This reflected my assumptions. This is kind of what I wanted to hear: that, yeah, this stuff is useful and interesting and good, but it’s never, ever going to be able to replace the creativity of the human spirit.
Of course, we’ve got to take the algorithm into account here. Someone created ChatGPT, and someone made the decision to provide positive responses, right? This could have easily been a response that said, “Yeah, you’re totally going be put out of work.” But that’s not what people want to hear, right? And so already we’ve kind of got this AI response, we’re assuming that there’s some sort of inherent truth in it because it’s reflecting what we wanted to hear, but at the same time, someone programmed something to air on the side of positivity, <laugh>, right? There’s something going on here.
We have to be suspect of everything these days, right? But that’s said, what this response provided is largely what I hoped or suspected to be the case: that these tools cannot replace human imagination and creativity and ingenuity and, and spirit and insight and imagination. So, you know, having gotten that response, I was feeling pretty good.
But then I was thinking about fiction writing, and I’m really into Star Wars. I’m into Star Wars toys and so are my kids. And my daughter loves the Rancor, who’s this big ugly monster from Return of the Jedi. And I got her this rain car toy that she treats like, kind of like a baby doll. Like she puts this horrific monster in a stroller and pushes it around and stuff. It was really great and fun.
But with that in mind, I said to ChatGPT “Tell me a story about a little girl with a pet Rancor.” And it’s amazing: you asked these questions and you can just see it being written like right in front of you within, you know, 30 seconds if that. I had a story about a little girl living on Tatoinne who had a Rancor as a pet.
And it’s funny because I, my daughter, my older daughter is in grade seven, and she had a great writing assignment last month where her teacher, and loved the way they were teaching it. They were really teaching story structure and teaching story planning and rough drafts and revisions and all this stuff. Anyway you know, as a writing coach myself, of course, I was helping my daughter or like, you know, watching her create this story and it was really fun and a really great story, and she illustrated it and it was this beautiful little adventure story that I was so proud of her for creating.
But then I looked at this story that the AI had written, and I would say it was as good. So <laugh> is ChatGPT going replace all of us tomorrow, all of us novelists? No, but it’s already writing, I would say at a grade-seven level fiction. And going back to like I was saying with the image stuff, it went from weird, awkward images to weird, awkward videos within a year. If ChatGPT already writing stories at a grade seven level, I don’t know if it’s that much longer before it’s writing fiction and writing perhaps novel length fiction.
In fact, having looked and kind of investigated into this technology, and how amazing and quickly it works, I suspect we’ve all already experienced AI writing without knowing it, certainly online, whether it’s social media posts or whether it’s blog posts. I guarantee each of us has already read something written by an AI and not known it.
I mean, I saw an article today that was talking about this 19-year-old girl who has been posting nude pictures on Reddit and has developed this huge following, and I guess making lots of money, however, people do that. Anyway, the point being, it was revealed today that this girl doesn’t exist <laugh>, it’s, she’s an AI-created character. None of it is real. And I’m sure the gentleman paying over however long it’s been, weeks or months, to see her photos are were not aware that she was not real. Which is to say, this is, this is scary stuff and its happening right now.
Should writers be afraid of AI? I mean, only so much as that, a lot of the 20th century has seemed to suggest that technology has in some ways made life worse or more dangerous.
But again, I think it’s Daniel Pink (was it him?) . . . someone has a book where he’s arguing that actually life is way better than it’s ever been. Technology is helping reduce sickness and war, and people are better educated and in all of that. And so I suppose it, it’s what your perspective on the world is, what your perspective on the future is, whether this is going to be a good thing or not.
As you can sense, I certainly have some trepidation about it, but I could also see how it could work as a really cool tool. For example, I suspect if you were writing a book about an old man and you were having trouble figuring out how to describe his face, you know, in the path I might have said, well, head on over to Google Images and look up a bunch of faces of old men and use those as references and, and describe what you’re seeing there. I suspect now you could probably pop over to ChatGPT and type in “What does your average old man look like?” Or “What does an old man with gray hair look like?” and you’d probably get a decent starting point that you could then adapt and work into your fiction writing.
I think if we look at it, I mean, we have to embrace it to some extent.
Actually, not necessarily.
I suppose <laugh>, I think of the artist Seth he’s an incredible comic book artist here in Canada, and he’s basically rejected all modernity <laugh> and he’s kind of like locked himself into kind of like the fifties, I think, fifties aesthetic, fifties culture, fifties everything, and kind of rejected anything after that pop culture wise. And so is rejecting AI writing a possibility for you as a writer? Absolutely. Absolutely. You can just say the tool is out there, the technology is out there, and I don’t care. I’m going rely on my skill and my imagination and, work from there. And I guess a lot of people probably will do that.
But I think there’s another perspective that we can take, which is that it’s a tool, it’s out there and use it in a way that seems helpful to you, but also obviously, I mean, we haven’t even touched on this idea of plagiarism, of kind of intellectual theft. I mean, that three-paragraph response that ChatGTP gave us, I mean, those ideas are coming from somewhere, those sentences, perhaps the ais putting the sentences together, but they’re absolutely based on sentences humans wrote on the internet that it’s scraping and, and putting together. And so there’s that whole issue as well of, of, will, will we ever be able to protect our intellectual property? What is the morality of plagiarism in a world where AI writes as good as people? I mean, who knows?
I’m not a futurist, you know, maybe Warren Ellis or someone out there has a sense of where this is all headed. I don’t know. I’m like you, I’m along for the ride, but I think fearing the future isn’t healthy. So I think you can’t pretend this isn’t coming, or you can’t pretend it’s already here. It’s out there. Like I said whether we know it or not, we’ve read AI-created writing, and I, I mean, okay, <laugh>, here’s another conspiracy theory that’s out there.
Amazon decided to create a Lord of the Rings television series, and they spent billions
of dollars on it. It was the most expensive television series ever made. And who did they hire to write it? A couple of nobodys <laugh>. Some folks who have kind of been kicking around Hollywood for 10 years, and never had any big successes whatsoever. And at the time, people were like, “Huh, I guess they had like a really great pitch for Lord of the Rings.” But, of course, the show came out and was awful. And now people are theorizing that perhaps Amazon had the show written by an algorithm. And you can’t hire a successful artist and then tell them, “Hey, the AI’s gonna write this show for you, Stephen Spielberg,” or, “Hey, Quintin Tarantino, want to write Lord of the Rings? By the way, it’s actually going be an AI doing the writing.” But what if you found some writers who hadn’t had a ton of H success in Hollywood, and, you know, tell ’em, “We are going to get you to work in collaboration with an AI to write a Lord of the Rings show that our algorithm tells us people are gonna like.”And obviously, the technology isn’t quite there yet, given the show was a disaster.
But the point being, I mean, there might be, ugh, we might have taken one of the greatest pieces of human imagination, ever that is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and we might have handed it over to an AI. That’s scary. I mean, this is a conspiracy theory. Maybe that show was written purely by humans who were trying their absolute best and kind of missed the mark. Maybe.
All of which is to say, this stuff’s unavoidable. Don’t put your head in the sand and don’t fear it. Don’t fear it. So either reject it, be like Seth and say, “Whatever, it’s out there. Sure, maybe it can make writing my next blog post quicker, but I don’t care. I like the process of writing a blog post. I like the way it keeps my mind working. And I, I don’t want to use that tool”
Or say, “Hey, it’s a tool. I’m going to embrace it. It’s a tool. Like anything else out there, the Hero’s Journey, <laugh> Campbell took a look at storytelling and figured some stuff out, and now we all use it.” And so maybe AI will be just another tool that we keep in our writer’s craft toolkit that we can use.
I encourage you to experiment with it or reject it. <Laugh> Just don’t live in fear of it.
And maybe one last thought here, Al Jaffees, the artists who created the Mad Magazine fold-in (like one of the coolest parts of that magazine where you’re looking at an image and then you fold it in both image and the writing below it, create a new image or a new sentence afterwards), passed away this week. And I was watching a video, I’ll link to it in the show notes for this episode he recorded in his nineties, and he was talking about how he’ll never retire and how he’ll, he’ll always keep cartooning. In fact, he has a Guinness Book of World Records <laugh> Award for the longest-working cartoonist, and he lived to be over a hundred years old. And I wonder if the fact that he never quit working is one of the reasons why he lived so long. And in the interview, he’s in his nineties, but he seems totally sharp, totally there, and maybe it’s using our minds and, and creating again and again and again for decades that kind of keeps our spirits up and keeps our bodies alive and keeps us going. If he had had an AI creating, those fold-ins for him, would he have lived to be a hundred years old? Would he have been able to make this video in his nineties and seem to be so alive and full of life and joy and art and creativity? I don’t know.
Will AI be able to write novels in not too long if it’s not already doing it? Yes. But <laugh>, if you have an AI write a novel for you, what are you going to do with the rest of your time? A lot of us, yeah, we want to sell a lot of books, and we want to make money, but we also just want to write. It’s how we like to spend our time. It’s how we like to use our brains and our energy and our creativity. And so I don’t think AI will ever replace my desire to write ,or my clients, or your desire to create and tell stories. And so that will live on.
We will know that Shakespeare wasn’t written by AI. We’ll know that Virginia Wolf wasn’t a robot. We’ll know that at least up until probably 2020, Stephen King was a real person. And so we’ll have a couple of hundred years of human writing that will never be tainted by AI.
And I think also humans will continue to write into the future regardless of whether this AI technology is out there or not. Maybe it’ll be writing all the blog posts, and maybe the social media will just be robots talking to other robots. But I think there’ll always be people sitting down and writing memoirs and writing novels and telling stories, because thinking is fun and creating is fun, and writing is fun. And typing an idea into a chatbot and having it write your story for you doesn’t quite give you that same experience of going through the amazing, incredible, life-changing adventure that is writing a book.
All right, if you are prepping to write a book, if you are getting ready, or if you’re mid-first draft and you want a little help to get there to the finish line, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/firstdraft. This is my group coaching program where we’re focused on getting an incredible first draft of your book written in six months or less. The doors are open, go over if you want to join today.
That is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You know, hit me up. Let me know what you think about this crazy ChatGPT AI writing technology out there. Do you think, The Rings of Power was written by an AI? Is that actually a possibility? I don’t know. You let me know and then hit subscribe so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
