by Fiona M Jones
I’ll always remember 2023 as the year when the manure hit the rotating blades with regard to AI-generated content.
For the first time, AI chatbots showed that they could produce, on demand, sentences and paragraphs in response to a given prompt. To all appearances, robots were writing articles, verses, narratives—and doing it a lot faster than human authors. Some writers felt genuinely threatened. Was AI about to render human authorship obsolete?
AI can beat humans on quantity of output, but can AI beat an experienced author on quality? Is there any real qualitative difference between material written by humans and content produced by AI apps? AI is speedier; AI is relatively accurate in the basic mechanics of text—spelling, punctuation, grammar. Of course AI will continue to improve in what it can churn out. But is there any realistic prospect of AI “improving” to a point where it becomes indistinguishable from the work of creative writers? Maybe you can imagine it. I can’t.
The argument continues. As AI-generated content begins to crowd the Internet, many people say they find it hard to spot the difference. I’m surprised by this. As an experienced reader and literary writer, I can sense pretty quickly when I’m reading an AI-generated article, even if it is a short informational piece that doesn’t attempt too much. It has an eerie blandness about it—every statement just a little too obvious, every paragraph following on by word association rather than progression of ideas. Reading it feels like chewing cardboard.
And of course that’s precisely what it is: cardboard. The AI apps are not thinking or composing; they are merely pulping up ever larger volumes of whatever’s already been written, then rolling it out into grey and flavourless prose, uniform in tone and utterly lacking in flair or freshness.
As a living human being with a mind and imagination all your own, you are able to create something no AI can create (and I believe never will). You may have errors in your punctuation and plotholes in your stories, but your work is something individual, organic, original.
On the most basic level, here are some of the things you are doing that no AI can even approach to:
1. Humour. You can set up a disconnect between action and result, or between two characters’ expectations, in a nuanced and relatable way, giving your story a momentary shift from tension to laughter. AI can run through its word banks, sort words by pronunciation and parts of speech, and come up with a pun that has no resonance outside of itself.
2. Dialogue. You can make characters sound like real people, not because you have ingested large volumes of text, but because you are a real person yourself. Your various characters may each have their own vocabulary and speech mannerisms. You can work techniques such as “unreliable narrator”, in which one character’s expression of their partial point of view tells the reader more than any of the characters are aware. Meanwhile, an AI can search its word banks for common idioms or swap out “he will” for “he’ll” in order to follow an instruction to choose more informal language.
3. Rule-breaking. You know when a grammatically irregular construction will work in favour of what you’re trying to achieve—whether it’s humour, sadness or irony. If you’re writing a rhyming poem, you know where to suddenly break the pattern you’ve built up. If you’re writing an opinion-piece, you know how to deconstruct a common cliché in order to underline your point. AI, however, can only work according to rules. If you did program it to break rules in its sentences, the best it could do is to search through a list of common spelling errors and stick one in somewhere. It cannot break the rules with creative intent.
4. Character development. Real people are multi-dimensional in personality—complex, often self-conflicted, with nuanced motives and small cumulative changes of focus. Well-written fictional characters resonate with all of this. Have you ever found, when working on a story, that your characters seem to “take over”, forcing you to rethink your plot to accommodate their emerging interactions? I don’t think an AI entity is ever going to experience the problem of its fictional characters becoming too lifelike.
5. Reasoning. We may not think of ourselves as logical thinkers, but if you’re writing a persuasive essay, you instinctively aim to suit your appeal to your readership. You have a sense of what will be your weightiest argument, and where to position it within your piece. While AI is raking through secondhand material to string keywords into all the most standard assertions on the topic and all the most unexceptional conclusions, you will be giving personal illustrations and reasons for your beliefs.
6. The read-aloud quality. Not every new writer’s sentences flow like a river; not every novice poet’s lines fall trippingly off the tongue. But at least we are aspiring towards effective prose or well-conceived verse. When we read it aloud, we can feel whether we achieve this or not, and we can look for ways to improve. I cannot envision any way that AI could be made aware of the aesthetics of writing: the joy of reading well-written words, the visceral pleasure or displeasure of a syntactical jolt.
7. Freshness. New thoughts, new ideas, new points of view. Quirky takes, flights of fancy, original imagery. You can write things that haven’t been written before, because your mind is more than the sum of information fed into it. Even if you decide to jump off a literary allusion, you’ll find yourself diverting it, subverting its subtexts into something it hasn’t been before. An erasure poem using Robert Frost’s words, repurposed into a 21st-century ecological message, for instance? I’ve tried that (it’s somewhere deep inside someone’s publishing pipeline somewhere). Even using a patchwork of someone else’s words, you cannot help writing something that’s yours and not theirs. You cannot write the same piece someone else is writing, even if you’ve both read all the same books. You are not a robot; you are a unique entity; you have something to say that no-one else has.
This is not an exhaustive list. It’s a brief collection of examples: the things we do that make our writing our own. This is why I am not afraid that AI bots will take my place as a writer.
Bio: Fiona M Jones writes short-form fiction, CNF and poetry. Her published work is linked from her website, https://fionamjones.wordpress.com/.
