The Spectator reports from writer Geoff Bagwell:
AI’s taken my job
No arts career is safe from the bots
This week I was replaced by AI. I saw it coming, but it didn’t make the news any easier to deal with. To be honest, it terrifies me for the future of our species. If that sounds a bit over the top, hear me out.
I am a writer. Not only that, I am a commercially successful one. Although you probably haven’t heard of me, I’ve published more than 300 short stories in women’s magazines over the past 15 years. From ghost stories in Woman’s Weekly to tales of romance in Take a Break Fiction Feast, I write them all. Sorry – wrote.
‘Dear Geoff,’ the email said. ‘Going forward, our in-house team will be using AI tools to compile future editions, but we thank you for your many contributions to the magazine over the years. Kind regards, Rebecca.’ Or to put it more bluntly: ‘We’ve replaced you with a robot.’
I'm afraid Geoff is not alone. A friend of FNN's - a cartoonist - also said that AI was killing his livelihood.
FNN has good reason to believe that AI will soon end writer's cramp forever.
FNN created a series of AI 'bot' sites for managing the creation of art, books and music.
FNN has generated over 50 non-fiction books on aibookbot.org - a small library in fact.
You may dismiss them as 'AI slop' but that is a matter of opinion.
Why? Because with each book taking less than an hour to 'publish' and costing less than 50 cents, you can build a whole library of titles that just cover the topics you are interested in and perhaps no-one else is. Certainly no traditional publisher would publish them - they are too niche.
This library has become a kind of story of a life via a series of AI-generated books and not a means to make money as why should anyone pay for a book that cost 25 cents to generate?
Aibookbot is perfectly transparent about the fact that AI wrote the books and the site itself deliberately does not provide the means for 'authors' to sell the books that AI generated. Although that won't stop some people from trying.
Yes AI makes mistakes - either basic factual errors or more bizarre hallucinations - but these are easily corrected.
FNN also writes children's stories (himself) but uses AI to generate book covers, to copy edit and generally assist in the publishing process - it's simply easier and cheaper to do so and the results are perfectly acceptable.
The reality is that lots of creative types will be put out of business by what is essentially another rather devastating development of the ever-evolving market-capitalism that most people in the west participate in.
It's actually just the next step in the kind of order-of-magnitude change that 'gig' sites like Fiverr introduced when stuff that used to costs thousands could be bought for hundreds or less when lots of freelancers from all over the globe were able to compete online for your business in what were in effect reverse-auctions.
Some creatives will survive AI but only the cream of the crop, the top 1% who can continue to command premium prices for their 'unique' human creativity - yet even this premium content is destined to soon to become part of an AI training regime near you.
But in the meantime most people will be putting up their AI Banksys, reading their AI Archers and listening to their AI Beatles.
It's inevitable.