You know what genuinely flummoxes me? Regular, ordinary, content-consuming human beings advocating for AI automation in writing.
I was watching a YouTube video just now, and the creator mentioned that people sometimes asked him why he didn’t use an AI to write his videos for him. And of course he had his own response as to why not, but it all went over my head because I was too flummoxed by the question to think of anything else.
Producers, publishers, people who don’t care about the art, I can see them advocating for AI because for them, it’s more efficient and less hassle. They have to pay one less person, they get their product made more quickly, they get to overlook people who question the quality of the writing or the originality of the ideas. In the short term, anyway. I don’t know why anyone thinks they can get away with this in the long term, but that’s a slightly different conversation.
But, Christ. “Why don’t you just get an AI to write your videos for you?” What do people think writing is? Why do people think anyone makes anything? Writing scripts for videos sure sounds like a lot of work, why don’t you just use an AI to do it for you and focus on the other parts of the video? Why? Because then it wouldn’t be worth making! It wouldn’t be your own ideas, your own opinions, it wouldn’t be anything of substance. Is anyone actually doing this? Is anyone soulless enough to be in it purely for efficiency and money? (Don’t answer that.) Why would anyone be interested in the opinion of an AI in place of a real human being? That’s not someone’s opinion, that’s a Reddit feed restructured into a video. And that’s a truly horrific prospect, let me tell you.
Of course, this is about AI within the context of YouTube content, but it’s an equally stupid idea across the board. I’ve always wondered why writers take such a backseat in movie and television show credits, and it’s starting to look like that’s because of how they’re valued in the creative process overall. I can guarantee you there are executives at the heads of some of the most successful story-telling companies right now throwing their weight around to get AI to replace writers for the obvious reasons, because they do not consider real human writers to be important in the creative process of their movies or shows. Which is so intensely absurd. Without writers, what the hell is a story? Special effects and actors parroting stolen dialogue?
AI might be able to create a facsimile of a story, but unless it achieves some level of actual sentience, it will never come up with any new ideas of its own. Why do we bother to enjoy stories? If you can’t answer that question, maybe you should look into automating that, too. We can have AI making movies and AI watching them, then AI reviewing them and AI making YouTube videos about the reviews. It’ll be a perfect world, and we can all get back to doing labour. Wouldn’t want to go automating that now, would we?
I don’t often make blog posts like this, because I feel like all of the above has already been said, and my take isn’t necessarily contributing anything new to the noise. But sometimes, something comes along which is so earth-shiftingly ignorant that I have to say something about it, just to know that I’m not going mad. Let’s take the story-tellers out of story-telling, let’s automate art! Why? So we can make more money!
Isn’t the pursuit of technology supposed to improve our lives?!
Perpetually Perturbed 