David O'Mahony: Writers face backlash of generative AI

All you get with AI is what has already been done, and this is in an age of a noticeable decline in both media literacy and critical thinking skills

Like headlines, words in a story are pictures on a page. But you do have to be willing and able to put in a bit of work on the reading side to get the most out of them. File picture: iStock

Being a writer in the age of generative AI is by turns amusing, baffling, and demoralising.

That it’s coming alongside a noticeable decline in both media literacy and critical thinking skills is almost like a perfect storm.

On one hand, swathes of people are offloading creative thought to a plagiarism machine, while on the other, a cohort can’t read for colour or nuance in a text — and don’t want anybody else to, either.

One thinks of Frank Herbert, writing of the jihad against AI in his Dune universe: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” 

In a universe like that, thinking for yourself becomes an act of rebellion and individuality. 

Besides, where’s the fun if all you do is prompt a few words into a chatbot and get a spew of generic rubbish in return? 

Look at the romance book lists on Amazon — the titles are just tropes now, because they’ve been generated to the point of meaninglessness.

No blood, no sweat, no tears bar those of Mother Earth as she watches the ridiculous amounts of power and water that go into every data centre.

I should say there’s nothing wrong with writing to expected tropes or formulas. There are large markets there. 

But the people who do it for themselves actually have elements of their own lives and souls that they can pour into the work, not just soulless automated guff that sounds the same every time.

Dumbing down to the basics

Nonetheless, a vocal cohort online would rather every book be dumbed down to the basics — and while there is nothing at all wrong with reading at a level that feels comfortable, or in a style you particularly enjoy, advocating that this be diminished for everybody displays a dramatic lack of context, not to mention a lack of ability to learn new vocabulary.

Now, to be fair, these are skills that have to be both taught and learned. 

And while they are cornerstones of subjects like English and history in our school system, not everybody gets exposed to them equally, and there are places in the world where it almost feels like a lack of formal education is considered a virtue. 

And yet even there, that’s as much because of deprivation as policy and culture. You can’t miss what you don’t realise is missing.

Whether such readers are in the majority, or even a sizeable minority, is debatable. 

Social media is often the domain of he or she who shouts loudest, not necessarily a reflection of reality. But, nonetheless, these feelings are out there.

And while everybody is entitled to their own reading preferences — indeed, given how the number of people who read for pleasure seems to be decreasing, any reading at all is good — but there is an increasing polarisation along the lines of “if I don’t like it, nobody should do it”.

Some people hate epilogues and prologues for reasons which aren’t very clear, so they’ll often insist that writers — any writers — omit them. 

Losing the plot

There was a stir in writing circles recently when it emerged quite a few people only read dialogue, to the extent that some books received bad reviews about not being able to follow the plot, because they hadn’t read the prose.

My poor, gothic literature-loving heart.

And God help you from the number of people who’ll leave a review mentioning “telltale signs of AI”, when they’ve simply seen good punctuation, sentence structure, and imagery. 

(Remember, if you put Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into one of those AI detector websites, it sometimes gives a score of 100% because guess what AI was trained on.) 

One writer I came across recently had had to part with their agent because the agent wanted them to cut all similes and metaphors “because AI uses them”.

Now, those aren’t for everybody. And that’s fair enough — sometimes they don’t land right, and sometimes they rely on cultural references that are lost on the reader (especially pop culture ones).

But only this week somebody went viral for the wrong reasons by wanting writers to stop describing smells.

The logic being that, unless the character had a bit of kit or training, they couldn’t possibly differentiate what they’re smelling.

Describing a smell

Yet that misses a whole chunk of human existence. A smell might conjure a memory — pine might suggest forest walks as a child, rosemary a beloved relative’s perfume, with all the ancillary scents and feelings that come with it.

When you’re writing something like that, you’re trying to convey the pictures and sensations going through the character’s head — they may not verbalise that the particular aroma is peaty, woody, or cinnamon, but on some level their heads actually are. You’re pausing the action to give the character a little extra depth as well as evoking a feeling in the reader.

And you don’t get that with AI. All you get is what’s already been done. As the composer Hans Zimmer puts it, “AI doesn’t have a sound because the sound it has is the sound of the past”.

Like headlines, words in a story are pictures on a page. But you do have to be willing and able to put in a bit of work on the reading side to get the most out of them. 

There’s room in the literary world for all manner of tastes and foibles: It’s not a one or the other situation.

And remember, every word read is a little win against the machines.

• David O’Mahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor, a writer, and a historian