You're a writer – what have you got to smile about?

Because AI is coming for you. What hope is there?

The author authoring at the Halcyon Hotel, NSW, Australia

At the time, I thought it was a pretty low trick.

We were standing on the 8th tee at Eyemouth Golf Club when my friend Robert turned to me and said this:

“How is AI going to affect the work you do?”

We play regularly, Robert and I, and our matches are usually pretty even. This one wasn’t. He was five holes up. He was playing out of his skin: I was playing as if someone else was inhabiting mine…perhaps a five-year-old who had never played the game of golf before.

Perhaps only golfers know the depths of self-loathing you can plumb at these times. You feel worthless. You have nothing to contribute to the universe. Then your playing partner asks if your vocation, the work you have been doing for decades is, well, redundant.

Well, thanks, Robert. It wasn’t as if you needed more of a psychological edge.

I resisted the temptation to chase him over a cliff and into the North Sea with a 9-iron. Later, I realised that Robert was trying to be nice. You will not find a more congenial and empathetic soul in Northumberland and the Borders. As someone who knows the feelings of utter worthlessness of the failing golfer, he was trying to help – by changing the subject.

It just so happens that he chose a subject that is causing writers up and down the land to suffer an existential crisis.

But not this one.

And that’s all thanks to a tadpole-shaped thing called the Left Caudate Nucleus. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

The four nations of AI

You can divide people’s views on Artificial Intelligence according to which of four camps they sit in.

1. Powerful people – business leaders, politicians, large investors and the like – who are incredibly excited because the efficiencies AI promises will drive up profits and growth.

2. Fearful people – workers, voters and the like – who know all too well what ‘efficiencies’ mean for them and their families. And other fearful people – scientists, journalists etc – who expect to see the losing battle they are fighting over misinformation turn into annihilation once the nuclear weapons of AI are properly deployed.

3. Uncertain people who are nebulously aware that something big is happening, but they are not sure how it’ll affect them…on the simple basis that no-one DOES know.

4. Blasé people who say ‘bring it on’ – we will adapt, as humans invariably do, and anyway, isn’t it quite useful?

I imagine most of us are in the third group. But not me, in fact. I’m a (4).

Spot the difference

A real writer and one imagined by a doubtless male tech person on Unsplash

Most of my writing and training is in the field of travel and business. Could the copy you see written by travel writers and the content put out by industry’s owned media be written by AI? It could. Could most corporate copy be done by a machine? Absolutely.

Why? Because it already reads that way.

Humans learn language by listening and mimicking. The habit outlasts childhood.

Here’s an example.At this moment, journalists, copywriters, PRs around the world are sitting at their desks wondering how to describe a certain city. Their fingers begin to type the word ‘vibrant’. It’s like autocorrect, only it’s a purely human, organic process.

Someone opens the Linked In page and with barely a conscious effort, they write the words ‘Incredibly proud to….’ Even their grammar is instinctive. They realise – without thinking about it for a nanosecond – that they can forego the personal pronoun in posts like these.

Long before AI, we were autofilling, as if we all had a Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) installed in our brains.

Want to test it? Fill in the missing nouns that go with these adjectives:

Grinding _____?

Glaring _____?

Grandiose _____.?

Did you get ‘poverty’, ‘error’ and ‘scheme’? And that’s just a few of the Gs.

One day, I could – and might, as a thought experiment – write the phrase ‘glaring poverty’. Nothing wrong with that. I bet we’ve all been to places where the living conditions of the people really do deserve a word that (says my online dictionary) means ‘highly obvious or conspicuous’. But your brain would register that something is wrong. Surely he means a different word?

We are in a region deeper than mere cliché here. We are satisfying a need to complete a pattern. Catchphrases and refrains work in the same way. That applies if you’re a 1970s British game show host: Nice to see you….[altogether now] TO SEE YOU, NICE. It applies to RaeShanda Lias-Lockhart, one of the hottest fashionistas and influencers around. Today we’re here to talk about something that has a lot of y’all confused, she begins every video on Instagram and TikTok. But I’m here to help. [Join in] IT’S REALLY VERY SIMPLE. LET’S LOOK AT THE BOARD.

Rae Shanda: it’s really very simple

The rapid evolution of AI came about once engineers adopted machine learning. Let the computers work it out for themselves and they will, a trillion times faster than even our cerebral supercomputers can.

So, what hope is there for mere humans when something with the byline A I Generated can work out what you are going to write before you’ve even thought of it?

It really is brain science

The best piece I’ve read about the threat to ‘real’ writers from AI and predictive text is already ancient. It’s from 2019: John Seabrook’s The Next Word in the New Yorker. Perhaps I like it because it gave me an answer to Robert’s 8th tee question and the one I posed at the end of the last section.

Seabrook looks at advances in machine learning and relates them to the way a human brain works when its owner is writing. Here, he quotes research from neuroscientist Martin Lotze at the University of Greifswald:

Lotze…compared brain scans of amateur writers with those of people who pursue writing as a career. He found that professional writers relied on a region of the brain that did not light up as much in the scanner when amateurs wrote—the left caudate nucleus, a tadpole-shaped structure (cauda means “tail” in Latin) in the midbrain that is associated with expertise in musicians and professional athletes. In amateur writers, neurons fired in the lateral occipital areas, which are associated with visual processing.

Does this mean there is such a thing as a writer’s brain? If so, we have something common with London taxi drivers, whose cerebral organic matter is famously reshaped as they take on The Knowledge, the Herculean task of learning every road in London. You have to write a lot; and then you begin to write uniquely.

Until the time ChatGPT develops a left caudate nucleus, we’re in the clear.

Spiral tap: the left caudate nucleus (marked in red) Wikipedia

AI, can you finish this article with something sensible and meaningful?

Don’t start here: Eyemouth Golf Club

Could AI do a Mark Jones blog? No question it could, if it wanted to, which it doesn’t. You can trace this writer’s inspirations without too much trouble or too huge a dataset – some P G Wodehouse here, some C S Lewis there, a hint that I’ve been channelling fellow bloggers Helen Lewis and Jon Ronson. Because I am a mimic, it may even pick up a little of that John Seabrook piece in the way the argument develops (John, I hope we can agree there is a big gulf between that and, er, plagiarism).

The patterns and memes of my prose are recognisable enough: a rhythmic tendency to repeat phrases, the use of parentheses, mixing up long and staccato sentences. All straightforward enough.

But sometimes, I think the best thing we writers have going for us are our flaws and bad decisions.

Take the beginning of this piece. If AI were to write a blog about the threat of AI to writers, it wouldn’t start with a chance remark on a golf course. In doing that, I probably alienated 75% of this blog’s potential readers: and what sensible machine would do that?.

But it was a real experience in a real place. And real writing should always start there.

I’ve got more to say on this. In the next blog, let’s have a look at information versus style.

A note about No-Nonsense Words

You’re reading a free post. There will be plenty more where this comes from as I comment on interesting stuff that crops up about writing and writers.

Opinions are fine, but readers – who are usually writers themselves – also want practical ideas about composition, grammar, style and the rest.

So, in the coming weeks and months, I’ll offer a separate blog with the kind of advice I offer as part of the training courses I run with Kerry Smith. Those posts will be for paid subscribers only.