Artificial Intelligence (AI): towards a real-world dystopia?

I’ve read an interesting Dutch article recently, titled: Can Technical University students still do without ChatGPT? I pride myself on celebrating human artists and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-free books, but this was the first time I actually thought deeply about the impact AI can have on humanity and our society.

Before AI, we already noticed the detrimental effects social media can have on our youth regarding mental health issues and decreased attention spans. Now, we have AI added to this, with the crème de la crème of our society, IQ-wise that is, becoming increasingly reliant on AI to pass their exams. And AI is likely still far from reaching its prime.

But what does it mean when the engineers, lawyers, medical doctors, and politicians of the future no longer learn critical thinking at their prestigious universities, but let AI do the thinking for them? My heart becomes heavy as I contemplate the long-term effects this could have on humanity. Hence my rather macabre blog post title.

What happens when AI determines how we diagnose patients or how we design skyscrapers? What happens when AI decides political strategy? What happens when we become so reliant on AI to think for us we lose the art of thinking ourselves? And when the next generations, raised with AI, take over, and the previous generations fall into their eternal rest, who will be there to see to it that AI is not making subtle mistakes?

AI is trained on human content, but when humans rely so desperately on AI to create content for them, won’t there come a time when AI will be trained on its own generated content? Won’t the quality decrease instead of increase, and what will that mean for the critical decisions that need to be made by those future lawyers and doctors?

I’m not sure I want to see such a future.

As an author, I also can’t help wondering how this will impact writing and publishing books. The first effects are already noticeable: people, with and without the knowledge about the art of writing, are flooding (online) bookstores with AI-generated books.

This Dutch AI-writer for example, creates 10 (!!) non-fiction books a day in niches publishers usually aren’t interested in. Books like ‘Everything you need to know about the platypus’ and ‘Tai chi for beginners’. Does he have the knowledge to write these books? No, and he admits it himself. The knowledge, the writing, the structuring of the books are all AI. For better or for worse.

On the fiction side, a romance AI-writer spoke out on how she uses AI to generate 200 books a year, and she can proudly teach you exactly how to do it. That leads me to think…

Can AI replace writers?

Well, I think yes and no.

There are several types of readers (and I’m not judging, by the way):

Those who read for escapism: after a long and demanding day, they turn to reading to take their minds of the worries of the world.
Those who read for meaning: they seek intellectual challenge in prose, character, plot, and/or setting.
Those who read for both.

It won’t surprise you when I tell you escapist readers are the majority. It’s why binge-fiction thrives, why books with plot holes, superficial characters, and subpar prose can still be rewarded with high GoodReads ratings and bestselling lists. As long as they manage to entertain, and entertain well, the escapist reader is content. And again, there is nothing wrong with that.

Some prolific writers of binge-fiction have thus managed to make 5-7+ figures a year by writing for the escapist reader. And thus the golden age of self-publishing saw its advent in the 2010s, led by Kindle Unlimited.

I think AI-writers will directly target and compete for escapist readers. What I fear is that, in time, a significant proportion of those readers won’t mind it, as long as those AI-writers manage to delight them. You can already see it on Amazon: how AI-generated fiction books are slowly, but surely, climbing the ranks.

When the market is flooded with hundreds and hundreds of AI-generated books on top of the many books already written by prolific writers, the competition will become so suffocating, I think many who write for an income may not stay afloat.

I don’t see AI-writers targeting the other types of readers. At least, not at first. The type of books readers who read for meaning (with or without escapist features) cater to are so profoundly dipped in human creativity, so far from formulaic templates, it would be extremely hard for AI to mimic it well.

As an indie author who already has a hard time being visible to readers in this age where there are more writers than ever, more marketing savvy people than ever, and now also AI, I must admit the future looks a little bleak.

My motivation remains unchanged, however. I write for love, I celebrate human creativity, and I hope to find readers to join me on this journey.

Thank you for reading,