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October 4 question: The topic of AI writing has been heavily debated across the world. According to various sources, generative AI will assist writers, not replace them. What are your thoughts?

Richard: I like to think of AI writing similarly to chess computers. Eventually, it will become good enough that it could replace humans, but it never will, because we’ll still value the human element. 
Short term: Talking to my friends who are professional writers, AI is not even close to the point of doing anything besides writing shitty SEO articles (which it’s been able to do for some time). The general consensus seemed to be that AI would need to get about twice as good as it is now just to do basic ad copy at the minimum acceptable level. AI could play chess in the 80s, but anyone who put any amount of effort in could beat anything short of the best of the best programs running on the best of the best hardware (and even those were only “okay.”)

Medium term: I think that learning to write prompts, revise, etc. is a valid creative skill. Sometime in the next year or two, people who are good at writing prompts will start being able to churn out something worth a couple bucks. Good human writers will still be able to do better. By the mid 90s, your computer could probably beat you at chess.

Long term: AI will probably be able to writer “better” than most or all humans, but we’ll continue to value human authors and consume their work. I’d put this somewhere between 5 and 10 years out, but hedge earlier ‘cause these things seem to really GO once they hit a certain point. Depending on how good AI detection winds up being, there’ll be some degree of drama about whether books are written by humans or not (and how much “help” you can get on a piece and have it still count as human written). Traditional pub will probably get even messier and harder to break into than it is now. But, in the same way that (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of people still watched the FIDE championship this year (and millions of people play chess), even though the player’s phones could probably woop them, people will still write and pay for human writing. On some level, this is already a thing with human writing. I forget who it was, but I read an article recently about a self pub author who was able to trad pub, and people still liked their first blog-published book better because it was raw, messy, etc.