Losing faith in human creativity means we can’t have nice things
This week I watched a fandom blow up over an AI witch hunt. Until recently whenever you read something, you knew a human had created it. Whether you enjoyed it, or not, thought it well crafted, or not, you had respect for the person who wrote it as a creative-endeavour.
Now we’re suddenly suspicious. How human is that writing? And writers are being asked to prove themselves. Could a human really have come up with this characterisation or plot twist? Could a human really have done this research and developed this new way of thinking about a topic?
Three years ago, you would not have questioned this.
Now, your thought is: is this AI?
Work is either too perfect or not perfect enough. It’s too clever, or it’s missing something. Do errors mean it is human or that it is computer generated?
What has this got to do with fanfic? People love the characters and want more of them. Suddenly a whole new audience discovered fanfic and they were delighted. But they were also navigating an unfamiliar space. And nowadays we are not used to waiting for updates to our fiction, as if we were reading a Victorian periodical.
Two things happened at once: people clamoured for fics to be updated more speedily; and people started to question how these works came to be.
There are some truly gifted writers out there. But not everyone believes people writing in their spare time can necessarily be churning out well-written plots. And then there’s the question of how fast people write. How long does it take someone to write 100,000 words?
People got suspicious. We don’t like feeling we might have been duped. Suddenly posts appeared about ‘that popular fic that won’t be named but’ as people with no evidence started accusing authors of using AI instead of tapping away under their own steam.
Writers were being attacked as people claimed they were not the true authors of their work.
Like so many things these days, we seem to have turned the writing world inside out.
We no longer believe humans can be brilliant. Now we suspect they are cheating some how.
I’ve seen posts saying writers need to prove they had written their work. Show us the drafts!
Sorry, what?
I don’t keep drafts. I write in Notion these days because I like the filing system. Everything I write is produced in the traditional way: write a sentence, look at it, delete it, try something else, get a paragraph down, see if it leads to another one, decide you don’t like that idea and go again. Eventually, there’s a blog post, newsletter, or sales page.
There is no draft.
But also, why on earth should writers have to show their half-formed thoughts, dead ends, and work that would have ended up in a wastepaper bin a few decades ago?
Why do we suddenly have so little faith in humans and their brilliant brains?
Do we fear that humans are some how inferior to machines?
Our brains are less creative? No way! Anything created by AI has come from centuries, if not millennia, of human talent.
Of course there will be people who take an easy shortcut but they will never have the satisfaction of seeing their work published, or getting reader feedback about how much they enjoyed it.
There seems to be a decrease in trust in the world. And the result is we can’t have nice things.
Authors have taken stories down. It means people partway through reading them will never find out what happened in the end. And now there is much wailing about how unfair it all is.
