AI Annoyed

Confession: I've been looking into selling out.

Teaching is hard, substitute-teaching is dehumanizing, and doordashing all night got your girl looking like Demi Moore at the end of The Substance (spoiler alert: not cute.)

Equipped with my millennial toolbox of all the internet has to offer, I signed up for some web marketing courses on Coursera, updated on my resume on LinkedIn and Indeed, foisted myself onto local daycares because, trust and believe, if you have a clean criminal record someone somewhere will always be willing to pay you to watch someone else's kids--a pittance, mind you, but a wage, nonetheless.

Capitalist mindset capitulating, I even clicked on the Audible Ad that plays at the beginning of every other youtube video and signed up for The Free Online Live Training that is somehow always magically scheduled to start within half an hour of you clicking the link.

This gentlemen in the video above advises using AI to kickstart the writing. Fine.

The training video I clicked on touted a system that takes in search terms and spits out entire AI-written and narrated how-to tomes.

Um...

As both a taurus and a millenial, I'm all for easy money, but as someone who has written, designed, and published two ebooks and a paperback, I can't help but take in the "NO WRITING REQUIRED" reality of this operation and think, EXCUSE YOU???

Yes, I'm aware AI has taken over the internet. I've searched the listicles. I've used the listicles. I've let ChatGPT talk me through everything from getting over a breakup to poaching an egg. I'm just as guilty.

YET, letting robots write entire books, even if they are how-to books, feels just a step too far, especially when there are plenty of human experts out there to write said books.

But, Rae, You might say, You great AI hypocrite! Isn't an instructional ebook just an AI generated listicle in longform? What the devil is the difference?!

And to that, I say: so much.

A lot has gone into improving AI over the years. Data Annotation and Outlier have employed people from all over the world to edit, fact-check, and train AI. With the current AI publishing software, not only does the program do all the research, outlining, and structuring of the book for the "author," it also gives the option of customizing literary tone. You can very easily publish an empathetic first time guide to bee-keeping or a somber introduction to Wrestlemania lore without ever having to ponder word choice, motif, intention, or anything human.

Perhaps the fact that AI writing books bothers me more than people leaning on AI for emotional support is what's truly sad here, but am I alone here in my agitation? If AI is writing how-to books, what's to stop AI from writing the next Great American novel or play or movie? What will happen to human creativity then? What will happen to humanity at all?

Moreover, why are we so obsessed with teaching machines how to do something we used to do for fun and education (like writing and creativity) when there are so many other jobs humans could happily do without? Why don't we invent more self-cleaning houses? Or, at the very least, trash that takes itself out?

People (i.e., me) used to dream of writing books, and now we hire robots to write them.

I can't help but foresee us as those floating gluttons forever focused on tablets as portrayed in the movie Wall-E, not creating, not fixing, not communicating, forever content to stare into the hypnotic blue light of machinery and consume.

I take comfort in the fact that AI's movie-writing capabilities are not quite up to snuff yet.

The screen-writers can at least rest easy for another year.