At the beginning of this school year, I had to research my chosen career field, creative writing, to see its future career prospects. This was before concerns about AI reached the mainstream. Now, I am looking at AI and how it could affect my career choice.
I am no more worried about not becoming an author than I was before AI.
Most careers that focus on the arts are risky to get into because strong discipline is needed to make consistent money. Not everyone makes it because it’s a competitive field. However, I do not believe that I will need to compete with AI.
AI does not have feelings. It doesn’t know how to connect with readers on a deep level.
AI is not creative. It has a limited amount of stories it can create with one prompt. Asking it to write two stories with the same prompt causes it to create the same story, changing some words.
How could AI produce a series? How could it create something without plot holes or loose threads? How can it develop the characters and story in a meaningful way?
If someone reads a single story by AI, it seems fine. However, once it’s prompted to create more stories, its stories show a predictable pattern.
AI learns from human input. But where does that input come from for stories? No one is writing a whole story to give to AI. Instead, AI is taking published and copyrighted stories to use them to create new stories.
This is what my worry with AI is. It won’t steal my job – it will steal my work.
Right now, copyrighted works are not protected from AI training. There is a debate over whether “fair use” protects AI writing.
Hopefully, copyrighted works will be protected from AI by the time I publish a copyrighted work. But even if they aren’t, I will still continue my passion.
There will always be people who need stories written by humans.
