A professional writer I follow on the Book of Faces posed a question I feel merits a response. The writer in question I will not name, because I don't want anybody to dogpile their page with rants and screeds. That's what my comments section down below is for. Just know this person is not a newly-minted author -- they have won awards, worked in multiple mediums, and have been doing their thing for more than fifty years. They are someone intimately familiar with the work and the craft. They are also interested in exploring the outer limits and philosophies of new technology, and have a long time interest in the study of artificial intelligence, which several of their novels have been based upon.
The identity of the writer who asked this question IS NOT IMPORTANT. If you follow this person and know who they are, do not name them in the comments. This is not about the writer, it is about the question itself.
Said question, which I am re-wording here, is this:
Human beings learn how to become writers by reading, studying, and imitating the works of other writers. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Lovecraftian books and short stories available, which are all written by people other than H.P. Lovecraft. The writers of those stories studied the themes, the plots, the language, and the structure of Lovecraft's fiction in order to create their own interpretations. So, were they 'stealing' from Lovecraft? 'Scraping'? 'Imitating'? How would one best describe what these other authors did and are doing today with regards to Lovecraft's corpus? One cannot write a 'Lovecraftian' piece of fiction without actually studying and digesting similar works and analyzing them to see what makes them work.
Given that AI acquires its knowledge of how to write by basically the same functions, and given that so much of human writing is imitative and stands on the shoulders of what came before it, what makes AI writing any different if it learns basically the same way that people do?
My response to this experiment follows, but I'm interested in hearing yours as well.
AI "learns" by ingesting huge quantities of data which, technically, is also how people learn. The major difference to me is that it ingests far more data than any one human being could ever conceivably consume in a lifetime. And it ingests this information in large batches which it is capable of processing so quickly as to be almost instantaneous by human standards. The AI doesn't need to start with Hop on Pop or One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish; you can throw the complete works of Proust or Dostoevsky at it and it will absorb everything just fine. Any 'output' it creates, however, is limited by the data which has been fed into it. So if, for instance, your AI of choice has been given no information that a country called "Belgium" exists, it can't look at a map and learn something new on its own. Large Language Models (LLMs) not only don't know what they aren't taught, but also they literally don't know what they don't know. As far as the LLM is concerned, if it's outside the data set, it doesn't exist, and the LLM can't know that it doesn't exist.
Humans, by contrast, create written works that are shaped by what we have read and studied, but also by what we have experienced, witnessed, and been impacted by in real life. Those of us who write, whether it's blog posts destined to be read by a handful of people, or best-selling novels read by millions, are building on what others have written, it's true. But my building blocks are not the same as yours. No two writers, even if they write in the same genre, come to their style in quite the same way.
We are shaped by not just what we have read, but also when we read it. We are shaped by the society in which we resided when we read it. We are shaped by our emotional state. By our age. Our gender. By what else we had read before it, and what we read after it that might re-contextualize it should we choose to read it again.
Even by whether or not we wanted to read it in the first place.
Zoom in! There's a naked woman in each pupil!
I read The Great Gatsby when I was fourteen years old, and I hated it. It made no sense to me, because I could not identify with a single character. I had a wonderful American Literature teacher, who did her best to try and explain what made the novel so memorable, to explain the themes, to explain the character motivations, but the Jazz Age world of Nick Carraway, and his enigmatic millionaire cohort Jay Gatsby, was a foreign country to a teenager in 1993. Couple that with the fact I wasn't reading it by choice, but rather because I was compelled to under penalty of getting a poor grade on the test, and the end result was that I absorbed just enough of the book to eke out a B- on the essay, and promptly forgot everything about it except for the cover until I picked it up again twenty-five years later to read for myself.
By that time, I had already been honing my writing voice for about ten years. Despite having read The Great Gatsby as a young adult, nothing about Fitzgerald's writing influenced my own. I didn't absorb it. I didn't memorize it. I didn't study it. Its themes, its style, all of the unfamiliar words it forced me to look up: none of that mattered, because I didn't care about the book as a creative art. It was an assignment to be endured, nothing more. Unless it slapped me across the face, I would not have recognized a Fitzgerald-ian pastiche by another writer. Mention This Side of Paradise, and I'd have assumed you were talking about the Star Trek episode. It played no part in my development as a writer until I picked it up again at age 39 and read it for what I think is only fair to consider the first time.
There are books and authors which helped shape my personal style, and from whom I learned the craft, up to that point in my life, but The Great Gatsby was not one of them. By the time I finished high school, Alan Dean Foster was an exponentially larger influence on me than F. Scott Fitzgerald.
That is the point.
Who I am, who I became, and who I'm still becoming, as a writer was shaped in a way that is completely unique to me as an individual. It isn't just reading that we do to learn the craft of writing; it is applying what we have read to the emotional state we were in when we read it that creates the special sauce. My ability to string together words does not simply come from devouring somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 books a year for the last four decades.
It also springs from my cultural landscape: the music I listened to, the plays I attended, the movies and television shows I've watched, the video games I've played, all of the creative works of others and the mindset I was in when I exposed myself to them, and the number of times I have re-exposed myself to them over the years. All of these intangible pieces, the lessons I had to learn, the pain I experienced, the jobs I have worked, the other languages I have studied, the highs and lows of my own life, the friends I've made and lost and loved throughout the years: they all constitute the fingerprint of my authorial voice.
You could feed into an AI the complete text of every book and short story I've ever read in my life, then tell it to create a blog post about, say, retro video games, and despite being "trained" on the exact same text, what the AI produced would stick out like a boner on a student called to the front of the classroom. AI writing looks and sounds so similar because it isn't hundreds of thousands of individuals all rearranging the same 26 characters to form words, it's one individual being asked to do so hundreds of thousands of times, all based on the same corpus of text (millions of pages) and life experiences (none at all).
At the end of the day, the reason human beings create is because we have a story we want to tell, information we want to pass down. We have a need to put feelings and emotions and lived experiences on to a more permanent canvas outside of our own memories. We create to remember as much as we create to be remembered. And no LLM, no matter how large and powerful and well-trained, can equal that.
If you couldn't be bothered to write something yourself, then why the name of Jesse Ventura's minigun should I take the time to read it myself?
Only a sexual Tyrannosaurus would make that reference. Just like me.
