Why I Write: Creative Writing and the Fight Against AI

by Briana Kuni

Imagine this: The year is 2045 and the top five best-selling fantasy novels have all been written by AI. You sit down to relax after a long day, turn on Netflix and under the “New” section, you find movies and TV shows with entirely AI-generated scripts. Your favorite authors are now competing with computers who can not only write faster, but better. The world full of creative-minded artists that you knew and loved has become a world where creative writing is better suited for the artificial.

Does that terrify you? Because it sure scares me. 

I can admit that it doesn’t always matter to me who wrote a book or movie that I love, as long as at the end of my experience with it, I feel satisfied. 

But I think that this mindset is actually wrong and I’m not too proud to admit it. 

It should matter that the 300+ page novel that took ten years to complete was written by someone who had a dream and worked extensively and painstakingly hard to give you a few hours of escape into a new world. 

As a writer myself, I want my words to matter to you because I’m human. Despite my best efforts not to care what people think, I absolutely do. And if you care what people think of you or the things that you give your time and effort to, that’s okay. You’re not alone. 

Or maybe you don’t care what a complete stranger thinks about you, but even so, I know there’s someone in your life whose opinion matters to you. We’re human and to varying degrees, we all want to matter to someone. That’s not embarrassing to say, it’s the truth. 

The reason I think that the mind behind great works of art, literature, and film should matter is because for the sake of this creative minded person who hopes to one day find acclaim as an author, I want to matter to you.

I don’t want to live in a future where AI produced works are at the top of the New York Time’s best-seller’s list while I’m stuck at home writing my heart out for an audience of one. 

But the truth is, that’s already the reality that we’re barreling towards, full speed ahead. 

A recent article in The New Yorker detailed a polling of creative writing graduate students who compared prompt based writing completed by themselves versus AI-generated writing. Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer scientist, shared passages written by prominent authors and then fed AI a description of a specific scene that he wanted generated in that particular author’s style. At the same time, he had graduate creative writing students read the same sample passages and asked them to write a specific scene in the author’s style. The students then blind reviewed each passage and judged the work accordingly. 

The outcome of the anonymous tests initially found that the creative writing students all agreed they hated the AI-generated writing. However, after Chakrabarty imputed that particular author’s entire history of work and had AI re-write the specific scene, each creative writing student then picked the AI-generated work over anything their group had written. Meaning in this instance, AI became a more successful writer than an entire group of graduate-level creative writing students. 

I don’t know about you but I find that to be shocking, disturbing, and downright alarming. 

If this is true, then why write? 

Why spend countless hours researching, world building, developing characters, outlining, drafting, re-drafting, and then drafting again? 

Why spend so much time with your own imagination to then have your work picked apart by your peers, the general public, and that voice within our heads that tells us we’re not good enough?

Why not just let AI do all the work for us, especially if it has the potential to be done faster and better?

For me, it’s because I love to write and regardless of how those graduate creative students voted, I refuse to accept that anything AI wrote could ever be better than the words crafted by someone made of flesh and blood. 

Stories are so much more than just words on paper. They are love, pain, hope, and joy. They are the characters we read about that make us feel understood and inspired. They are the glimpses into places we may never see in our lifetime, but while in the pages of a story, it is where we find momentary adventure or solace. 

Perhaps AI-generated writing has the potential to bring me stories like this, but I still don’t want to read them. 

At the end of the day, AI may be able to write a story that moves me to tears, but it will always be a story that it will never experience the way I do. AI cannot feel, nor will it hold a story that touches their soul and keep it in their heart for the rest of its life. AI won’t read words of inspiration and use them to find bravery in tough moments, becoming a better version of itself. AI doesn’t know what it’s like to live in this world the way that we do and no matter how smart it becomes, it will never write from its own experiences.  

I want to read your story, just as I want you to know mine. 

I want to read stories from people, not robots. 

How about you?

If you answered yes, keep writing with your own two hands and your own mind. Resist the convenience of turning to ChatGPT for assistance with schoolwork, drafting emails, gathering research, or outlining your next novel. Do the work yourself and one day, when your hard work turns into a finished product that you are so very proud of, I want to read it. 

And if you answered no, I would just ask that you read this blog post again. And again. And again, until you come to understand that it was written by me, a person who sat down at her computer at the end of a long and tiring day to reach out to you. The same person who will keep writing because it’s what I love to do.