I saw my first AI "fic" today.
The user who posted the AI creation added "goes to show we still need writers" I took that to mean they were uploading it to show how bad the AI creation was. Due to that, I felt more okay opening it for investigatory purposes (I made a post a while ago saying that AI would produce a facimile of creativity and I was curious how correct that would prove to be).
In a word, I was extremely correct. The fic had no-to minimal scene intros or transitions, banal dialogue, characters flat enough to feel ooc, silly to non existent conflicts, and it "tells" everything (no showing, no extended metaphors or insightful similes).
Scarily though, each snippet was coherent. Like sure, the characters were flat and the conflicts (when they exist) one dimensional and the turns of phrase often felt cliche (which is exactly what one would expect to get from an AI, which formulates sentences based off of how often words go next to eachother). But the scenes themselves make sense. If AI wasnt in the title I wouldnt have been able to tell the difference between this and a 15 yo's first fic.
The danger of course is that this is how AI starts out. The more people use them, and input content into them they will get better at producing this facimile of a creative work. AI could probably learn to produce some or all of the common components of storytelling that I've noticed this and other AI products lack.The scarier danger for me is when it becomes good enough to justify publishing houses and studios attempting to replace expensive human writers. (And to a degree clogging up AO3... although I hope enough people in fandom are here for the human connections that that wouldnt be a concern...).
Look, AI will never be keeping human writers out of fandom. Theres no finite number of spots on AO3. But AI could keep human writers out of screenwriting and book writing (which do have finite spots/finite funds for written works) and then... we lose something beautiful and precious.
The beauty of human writers is that they constantly have new things to say because every lived experience is so unique and precious. no two people will write a character's emotions the same way or capture the tension of a plot with the same words. I have read and will keep reading thousands of fanfics about the same canon characters because each person captures their pain and love and failures and triumphs in new and exciting ways. Humans always bring something new to the table. Humans always keep learning. Experimenting. Changing the conversation. An AI will never be able to say anything new. They are actively doing the opposite of human thinking and creating. Theyre not doing research or looking up new words or playing with new turns of phrase. Instead theyre cycling through a fixed set of applicable word choices and chosing the one with the highest percent match for what should come after the previous word.
So three bad things happen if you all start using AI as a fic production shortcut:
- The AI improves its deepfakes of creativity. your requests, inputted content, and feedback all help it update the word selection math it is doing in the background. This makes it more likely that canon content stops being created by real people and instead starts being replwced by AI products.
- You learn and feel nothing. I mean it. Writing is a joy because every creation is a new research rabbit hole. a new word looked up in the thesaurus. a new way to make your readers sob from the feels. AI robs you of that process. So you think less. You explore characters less. You are deprived the joy of marinating in your blorbos angst and pain and love and joy while you decide exactly how to put that into words. Youre deprived the satisfaction of your own work. (And by being deprived of the process above you also dont learn how to write. because the AI is not writing.)
- Your readers lose out. Sure the AI has produced something perfectly spelled and grammared... but nothing new has been said. The grand conversation we are constantly having by writing and reading fic and exclaiming about characters stagnates and then festers. No new stories get told. AI is only producing things that look like what came before. your readers dont get any joy from new thoughts. new ideas. changed minds. changed perspectives... none of that happens. (Again I want to go back to point one. Im not worried about AO3 drowning in AI fics as much as I am worried that canon content will become overrun with it).
