A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors’ Guild event. Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger and I spent much of the session exploring the implications of a future where AI robots could create viable literary works. For writers, it’s a terrifying scenario. As we discussed the prospect of a marketplace flooded by books authored by prompting neural nets, I had a revelation that seemed to mitigate some of the anxiety.
No matter how good those robots get, writers, musicians, and artists will smear their brilliant and messy fingerprints on the output. Audiences will sense and respond to the humanity expressed by those works. On the amateur level, people might even get inured to clever AI-produced captions of their photos and realize it’s more fun to put their own twists on them.