We now have a new name for writers: SLMs, Small Language Models. I am an SLM, an organic being with a mysterious desire to express itself. What I do is write about my fellow human beings, and about the world in which human beings live, and do so as best I can. Up till recently I have been only one of millions engaged in this enterprise, one practiced exclusively by other organic beings. SLMs write from experience, which is perforce limited, and from our imaginations, which are not.
In this epochal context, I could not be more proud of the stand the Writers Guild of America is presently making, becoming the first to include in their reasons for industrial action and an industrywide strike, the insistence on immediate restrictions on the use that AI can be put. No film or TV or streaming story is to be created by a machine, they insist. No story idea to be created by one. No story created by a human to be completed by one. This technology will not pass. Not today.
Writers’ concerns aside, AI — as it is presently presented to us — poses a growing and existential threat to a great number of our professions, for if AI can thin the ranks of writers, then it will come for nearly all us, for writers are not easy to imitate.