Creativity is the one thing you can’t take away from people. Or something like that. But they never said anything about humans choosing to give it up. With recent technological advancements, artificial intelligence (AI) being one of them, people can now tell ChatGPT to think creatively for them.

Although people’s shared experiences of the human condition was what made literature hold up in every century. With it, people understood that what they are feeling right now has been experienced by, at least, more than one person, in more than one era. Although now, it seems “cooler” to have a robot write instead of a human but I can’t help but question whether it's really better?

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Human Condition & Anti-intellectualism

Writing, whether it’s a novel, essay, or poem, is a medium in which you have control and the limit is your own imagination. It is a great way to express yourself in any way you want. One crucial part of literature is how it all joins us to something called the human condition as it depicts all aspects of human nature, such as personality traits, experiences and so on.

In a constantly changing world, what remains important is keeping your voice the way it is. With so many people using AI even for the most mundane tasks, they’re on track to lose their own creativity and originality. When people become over reliant on this type of technology, while it may be quick, it is weakening your brain in the long run. The reason being is that the brain is a muscle that needs to be constantly working.

Now, not to get overly cynical, but what is the point of craving knowledge and learning if people tend to make a fatal flaw of prioritising instant gratification? With excessive usage of AI, critical thinking abilities aren’t being sharpened — quite the opposite. People say that we’re living in an era of anti-intellectualism and it is becoming increasingly more visible. With empathy and reading comprehension at an all time low and AI on the rise I can’t help but wonder what’s next.

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Passion or Product?

While there are tons of badly written and sloppy books — they’re written by humans. A person had to sit down and spend countless hours thinking, testing and finalising. There’s a kind of authenticity in it I would say, although it’s not great, a writer was passionate enough to bring their ideas to life and that is what AI lacks.

It cannot tell a story that hasn’t been done before. It can only simply regurgitate by stealing and learning from human writers. This raises a great amount of ethical problems. AI cannot form its own thoughts, it just simply skims the internet and takes what it feels fits the request.

One key point is the fact that every person it takes ideas or text from isn’t credited and the bigger issue is that they aren’t even aware that their work is being used in the first place. Someone’s hard work and thoughts are being output by AI and although can it legally do that? Remember that in schools we are made to show our bibliography and to cite our sources but does artificial intelligence know to do the same?

The answer is no. For all you know, your own writing could be used without your consent. With so many people using AI nowadays, what will happen if human writing is outsourced and only AI written literature prevails?

Will it constantly steal from itself until there’s nothing left to steal from? Only time will tell.

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AI’s Generated Failures & Harm

For instance, literary analysis is something incredibly subjective and each reader tends to have a differing interpretation. One which is made from someone’s own experiences, culture or even emotions. It has been said that AI tends to have a bias against women, marginalised groups and non-Western people.

AI fails at the intersection between different identities and the complexities of the human experience. Using AI in something so exclusive to humans just doesn’t feel right. In my opinion, hearing someone’s own personal insight on a story makes it much more personal than just reading something AI generated. Which may not sound like it’s worth it after I bring to light the fact that using AI is the biggest contributor to global warming. As it uses massive amounts of energy to generate an answer to just one prompt. If AI were to write a full-on novel, it would require an unimaginable amount of energy to do so. I would also say that most people tend to prefer work written by humans. There is an increasing amount of AI written books on Amazon yet I have failed to see someone make a video on how good it is, quite the contrary. I have only seen people point out the inconsistencies that it has and the lack of creativity it produces. People use writing as an outlet and as a job, I doubt they would give it up easily and I hope that others won’t favour AI generated content over work with soul and time dedicated to it.

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Reminder

While people definitely don’t churn out writing as quickly as AI, there’s one thing that can’t be overlooked — there is a stark difference between the quality. To put it in simple terms, remember “The Tortoise and the Hare”? In this case, AI would be the Tortoise and people would be the Hare. We all know what the moral of the story is — slow and steady wins the race.