On occasion I encounter a writers group as exists at Facebook where some express adverse opinions regarding the quality of A.I. novel writing. Generally A.I. is disparaged for production of low quality, detached prose fiction. I have a different opinion about that, especially since about 90% of students use A.I.
My own ventures in writing science fiction novels over the years informed me of elements of the writing craft. For instance I might read a low quality F.B.I. agent hunting a serial killer ebook and compare the works fo several authors and find what makes one interesting and another boring. While not being critical from a standpoint of comparing my own less than stellar science fiction novels to those books that I evaluate, I can as a reader learn what is wrong with those I have read- and what is right, and hope to use some of those elements in a future science fiction project.
I write about six books over the years in the science fiction genre before A.I. became a thing for writing fiction. Because I was poor when writing the editing was always lacking the quality of books packaged by professional publishing houses with numerous contributors to a novel from offering expert opinions and editing to proof reading. My works were hammered out sometimes in a co Alaska shed on an alpha smart using rechargeable AA batteries around 32 degrees f. Now in retrospect with A.I. becoming ubiquitous I am glad my works are the way they are- it is easy to see they were created by a human.
I have given some thought as to how fiction works will be published, and are being published these days with authors directing A.I.s to produce works following an author outlines of story structures, character arc criteria and so forth. I would venture to guess that graduates with college degrees in English will exploit A.I. created fiction works to the maximum extent possible with a single ‘author’ producing a thousand A.I. assisted novels a year. How many graduates with an English degree and ten of thousands of dollars of student loan debt not seek to spend a little time making a fiction novel assembly line o their laptop using A.I. in the hope of getting that one book that earns enough to pay of their debt? With practice producing a novel using A.I. could require less than a half hour of work.
On-line book sellers like Amazon and Barnes and Nobles may increase their inventories by orders of magnitude with the appearance of a flood of A.I. assisted novels. Human only authors may find it challenging to have their book seen in the marketplace with millions of new books appearing annually around the world. I believe that creative writing has experienced a fundamental shift as large as that which changed the employment outlook for calligraphic quality hand scrivened manuscripts following the arrival of the printing press. A.I. writing will displace some authors, obviously and reduce sales, yet it will also allow every human being to tell their story, or construct a story describing their experience of life in forms from thinly camouflaged reality to complete fiction. Thousands of women, thousands of students-even members of the Revolutionary guard of Iran may in theory be able to produce A.I. novels for-themselves that describe their point of view regarding politics and personal history in Iran since the Iranian Revolution for example. Civilians living in Ukraine may describe their experience following the end of the Cold war from their experience. With no limits to creation, storage, or marketing of new material- there may be a world of fiction vistas arriving with infinite horizons.
There are virtual formulas to writing forms of mystery novels such as the aforementioned F.B.I. agent acting like a detective to solve serial killer crimes. Artificial Intelligence is well versed in those forms and tropes that are pervasive in the genre. An author need choose the names of characters, the kinds and quantities of crimes, the character and history of leading protagonists etc and drop those into A.I. slots for its use in composing the story. The author might choose the story setting, the age of the F.B.I. agent, the obligatory handicap or unusual condition the special agent has that drives him or her to find the serial killer that often has killed the agent’s former partner and driven him/her to drink in an obsession to find the killer and in some way right the wrong. If actual F.B.I. agents work in a different way than as individuals with telepathy, an eidetic memory, approaching Alzheimer’s disease or fatal brain cancer, that need be of no concern to the author of Sam Spade as the modern F.B.I. special agent. The A.I. can understand that and pop out a book in a few minutes given the initial parameters. The author can always interpolate his own changes to the manuscript an A.I. has created should it produce poetry too sanguine, or murder scenes too politically correct. A.I. does have some limits with its use of imitative creativity for now; yet the limits are high and it does now its genre craft better than most authors- if not the most successful human authors- for the time being.
I believe that fiction films are likely to go in that direction too. Plainly one could create an internet movie site with independently produced A.I. movies comparable to YouTube- and YouTube may also have a branch with A.I. created movies uploaded by the authors of the movies. I wonder incidentally, how many decades the images of a movie star are protected from public domain use after the star dies? For example; is Humphrey Bogart's image and voice available now for use in making A.I. fiction?
The primary downside of the impending flood of A.I. created works is the adaptation of history to make historical fiction. Imagine for example, if Adolf Hitler is made to star in a film where he plays a Mother Teresa-like self-sacrificing benefactor of humanity freeing the down-trodden from suffering in the ghettos of the world? Wouldn’t such works tend to obfuscate real history from masses of people unread in history to start with?
The basic advantage humans will have over A.I. in writing fiction is the meta-paradigmatic interdisciplinary and synthetic points of view that A.I. will find challenging to logically compile. Sometimes insight arrives with contrasts and comparisons of systems analysis involving synthetic compilations that linear logic might not construct.
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