What will be the next industry to fall to AI? That’s the current panic inducing question on everyone’s mind. The consensus opinion used to be that automation combined with AI was going to take out the middle class/trade labor jobs. With the roll out of Open AI’s Chat GPT3, we quickly found out that writers were in trouble. Journalists are already losing their jobs to AI.
For all the doom about AI, there are a lot of voices out there trying to calm the masses by explaining that any artists or writers with real talent will be fine. Perhaps they will be for quite a long time, or maybe they will always be safe. Real art can’t be replicated by predictive text. So maybe the best artists will be safe from AI replacement. But for all the talk about artist versus AI, no one has asked about the readers. What does the average person prefer to read?
Its not whether you can out write AI, its what do people prefer to read?
Take a look at the romance genre. This is the largest genre in fiction by sales, and the biggest money maker in Amazon's Kindle. Both in terms of Kindle Unlimited reads and ebook sales. Its readers are known as the most voracious consumers, reading ten to twenty books per month. Romance has never been known for its high quality, intricate plots. Quite the opposite.
Some of the most successful authors in the romance space write the same book over and over again. They change the names, location and time period. That’s about it. 90% of the book will be relationship angst, 10% will be some vague, contradictory plot. The readers don’t care. They want the repetitive angst. They want the same characters with new names. They don’t want originality, character growth or plot twists. They want a man and a woman, and they want their specific trope. They want feelings. The readers want volume. They will read dozens or sometimes hundreds of books a year, provided those books have all the emotional points they are searching for.
This should have romance authors worried about their futures. AI storytelling was made for this audience. Once an AI is able to write 80,000 word stories, all you need to do is feed the formula into the AI, and it will produce books faster than you can read them. That ability might be waiting on GPT5 or 6. For GPT 4 it shouldn’t be that hard to feed your prompts in one chapter at a time to produce and edit a book in a few days. Even the fastest romance writers can take a few months to write a book. Putting out one per week is a game changer.
Originality won’t mean shit to the romance reader. On the whole, they will not be looking out for human made books. They will gladly buy mass produced, generic writing. It’s barely a change from what they are doing now. As long as it has a man that is six foot tall and rippling with muscles who is obsessive about his woman, they will be happy.
Mediocre Authors Should be Worried
This formulaic style of writing isn’t unique to romance. All genres have their authors who are known for churning out low quality stories at high volume. And every author that writes in this unoriginal way will be equally threatened by AI. It just happens to be romance with the highest volume of this style of writing.
This is the part that other writers are missing. The amount of readers that want generic writing. News media was an obvious first casualty. People, as a whole, do not read the news to be informed. They read the news to have a bias reaffirmed, and to be told who to be angry at and who to be afraid of. That is an easy task for AI. How hard is it for AI to turn a story into Orange Man Bad, or Dementia Man Bad. You don’t need a human for that.
For that same reason romance novels will likely be the next casualty. It doesn’t require massive software upgrades to produce that kind of generic story. It just needs a willing audience. Science Fiction won’t be that far behind romance. Alien threat + spaceship battles + quantum = new SciFi story.
The irony is that the hardest task for AI romance writing will not be in making a coherent story line, but in fact will be making an incoherent rambling, or purple prose, emotional angst kind of story. The lack of actual plot is the only reason AI hasn’t already taken over the romance space. Once AI can spit out fifty thousand words of “I love him but shouldn't” romance will officially belong to AI. Learning to write flowery angst might take a few more revisions, because of this science fiction might fall first, but only just.
Beyond fiction novels, who will be the next casualty? To answer that, ask what is being read by people with a sixth grade reading comprehension? AI alone isn’t the threat. It’s only through the dumbing down of the population that this is possible. Books were replaced by cable, cable is being replaced by short form content like TikTok.
It’s not just books and forms of writing that will be replaced by AI.
It’s anything that doesn’t require originality. Anything that will be consumed by an audience that is wholly uninterested in original ideas, but instead wants the same content churned out over and over.
It’s not a stretch to believe that movies and television will be replaced by AI. Many people are already talking about the idea. It's not a far leap to go from an AI generated book to an AI movie. You take the AI book, feed some design prompts into a future version of Midjourny, then combine the two for a movie. Given what's in the theaters and streaming platforms now, I doubt you would notice a difference. It would probably be an improvement over the woke garbage currently being vomited out.
It will work. Afterall, Marvel got away with remaking the same movie forty times. Iron Man, Nordic Iron Man, Vintage Iron Man, Tiny Iron Man, Magic Iron Man, Feminist Iron Man, Black Iron Man. You get it. There is a massive audience that doesn't want originality. They want the same story they love, over and over again.
The advances in AI programs in things like ChatGPT and Midjourny seem to be increasing on a weekly, if not daily basis. GPT-4 is promising to turn handwritten notes into apps and to be able to produce twenty five thousand word results. Midjourny is nearly to the point where it can make perfect photos, indistinguishable from real ones. Personally, I’ve been getting a lot of miles out of Midjourny. I’m looking forward to the next advancement. I see how to use its potential as an enhancement, not a replacement. Not everyone is as thrilled as I am.
Artists, specifically writers, are entering panic mode. AI is already replacing the mediocre. News outlets are laying off large percentages of writers and replacing them with AI. This should tell you something about the quality of the average journalist. Turns out they were the original predictive text bots.
The top writers and artists will become a specialty niche, writing to a dwindling audience.
If you want your writing to survive it has to be more than just original and compelling. It has to be interesting to people with poor reading comprehension and low attention span. It has to be sophisticated enough to catch the attention of people who are readers, who have a higher reading comprehension and who aren’t zombified by social media. Unfortunately the second group is a shrinking size. It won't be long before it's too small a size to support a writer.
I know this took a bit of a doomer turn towards the end here. It’s not hopeless. The first step is to make sure your writing truly is unique. This isn’t just for romance writers. All writers need to be unique and interesting if they want to survive. One way to do this is to live an interesting life. Boring people have nothing to say that is worth hearing. So do something interesting, meet interesting people. Actually live a life. Then of course, write about it. Write as much as possible until you become good at it.
Learn to use AI to your advantage
This isn’t optional. If you’re going to stick with original writing, then use AI to animate and enhance your writing. It can work for fiction and nonfiction. Don’t try to fight against it, embrace it and use it to enhance your work. I discussed that with @SubstackLinda in Episode 19 and with Remy in Episode 20 .
It’s entirely possible that self publishing platforms like Amazon will try to filter out AI generated writing. It’s equally possible that they won’t. Don’t hold your breath on anyone protecting you from AI. Either you try to out compete it, or you learn how to use it.
The second step, which is by no means easy, is the most important. We need to educate our children, and reeducate ourselves. Not public school miseducation. They need schooling, whether private or home, that results in adults that can read and comprehend. We are not trending in that direction. Long before TikTok and AI, around 80% of adults did not read another book after high school. Those that did would only read at a tenth grade level. Now it’s down to a sixth grade level. That number will be worse in the coming years.
Teaching your children how to read and write at an advanced level is not going to be what defeats AI. AI is here to stay. The point of educating your children, and re-educating yourself is to make sure that you can distinguish between mass produced crap and original writing. To make sure you are resilient to propaganda, something most people failed at before AI.
As with every other problem we face, you have to take control. You cannot just sit back and wait for the government to save you, nor can you sacrifice your children to the social media overlords. It’s not going to be easy. Nothing worth fighting for ever is.