It's not often that FNN disagrees with Caitlin Johnstone but I think she has missed the point here:
Using AI Instead Of Writing Turns Your Brain Into Cheez Whiz
This sucks. I don’t like what we’re becoming. I don’t like how AI is making us so dumb so quickly that the simple act of writing is already being described as “manual laboring the words out one by one,” like it’s some superhuman feat of exertion that nobody should be expected to be capable of.
AI does not write in the conventional human sense, it generates from its training set.
An AI trained on the work of Jane Austen would struggle to write like Dostoevsky.
It could try and even if you kept prompting it with Dostoevskian suggestions to improve the text it would take a while before it got anywhere near.
Writing - especially fiction writing - is not a math problem and it remains to be seen if AI could generate 900+ credible novels based on classic fiction texts anytime soon as OpenAI has done with solutions to 'hard' math problems.
Even if an AI is trained on all FNN's blog posts it cannot write in FNN's voice because it is not FNN but a simulation of FNN.
Even the generation can depend on a human prompt, outline or other guidance.
FNN knows because we created a site called AIBookbot (aibookbot.org) that does exactly that - generate AI non-fiction books from as little as a title to a fully-formed outline.
If you want a quick structured explanation of some topic that interests you personally then having AI generate a book for you is a lot simpler than spending a day or two searching the Internet then compiling all your 'research' into book form. A 15-20,000 word short book typically takes less than 10 minutes to produce and publish.
If you enjoy the distraction of surfing the Internet then knock yourself out, you don't need AI, as you clearly have plenty of time to waste down the rabbit hole.
But is an AI book any good?
Only you can be the judge of that since it was produced to your 'design' - the AI model just used its training to generate the content it thinks you want for your book.
It's nothing more or less than that.
Here's an example - Existentialism 101 - if you think this book (that took c.10 minutes to generate) is 'slop' then you are entitled to your opinion. FNN has read a lot of introductions to existentialism over the years and we don't think this is a bad first effort in 10 minutes for a cost of under 50 cents.
https://aibookbot.org/book.php?b=existentialism-101
So FNN does not think that real human authors have much to worry about only that AI-generated content will flood the market and make it even harder to sell stuff and make a living than it is now - as is already happening with music and will undoubtedly happen with art but maybe not with ballet, yet.