How Will GenAI Affect Writing?
What painters can tell us from their experience with photography
“This is the end of art. I am glad I have had my day”
- JMW Turner on photography
Today, there is much handwringing about artificial intelligence, especially generative AI (GenAI), and how it will affect traditional industries. Though lower-skilled workers have long worried about automation, with OpenAI’s launch of the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT, knowledge workers, creative professionals, and the educated classes now have to worry, too.
Nowhere is this clearer in writing itself. Text was the first thing ChatGPT offered, and, clearly, it delivered. For all the talk of IP protection and hallucinations, GenAI models are amazingly good at summarizing text and providing human-like answers to questions.
While it’s tempting to throw our keyboards up and say this is unprecedented, the arrival of the photograph in the mid-18th century and its effect on painting closely parallels our current situation, and provides a framework for thinking about the current moment. Ultimately, this analogy should make us more optimistic: while AI will no doubt affect writing, the craft, much like painting, will survive and perhaps become stronger for it.
Why photography
Though the introduction of photography occurred a long time ago in a world that feels far away, there are several reasons to consider the comparison.
First, we have a new, unbelievable (at the time) technology being introduced. Arthur Clarke’s famous statement that “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic” holds for both GenAI and photography.
Second, the new technology performs well at the more prosaic tasks of the original craft. To the extent that painting is about recording what a person (or place, animal, etc.) looks like, photography can perform quite well. Similarly, to the extent that writing is simply providing and summarizing information, GenAI is very good at writing.
Third, in both cases, no one saw the new technology as an art form. Upon its introduction, artists regarded the photograph as a crude machine, much like literary awards, which have been horrified to learn that authors like Rie Qudan used AI in their writing.
Fourth, artists then and writers now were both in a weak spot before the launch of the technology. Though we think today of the 19th century as a wonderful time to be an artist, in fact supply was outstripping demand then, too, as with writers now.
Finally, employment prospects loom. Some artists, such as Turner in the quote above, feared that by capturing an image, photography would render them unemployed. Writers today feel very threatened by GenAI, as evidenced by the Hollywood negotiations.
Insights
Beyond being an interesting parallel, the introduction of photography provides several insights into how GenAI will likely affect writing.
First, despite the standard story, photography did not kill the portrait or painting more generally. As art historians Rooseboom and Rudge note, while people today often link the two (as did some then, like Turner, above), the majority of painters then did not think so - they acknowledged it as a difficulty. Still, they felt the profession was, to some extent, going out of fashion before. And, taking a longer-term view, while portraits of all types have become less fashionable, painting is still a vibrant art today - photography has not killed it! Contemporary paintings still sell for millions.1
Second, that is not to say photography did not affect paintings, or, by extension, GenAI will not affect writers. By capturing the representation of a person or thing, photography pushed painting to become more abstract and to focus on the more “human” aspects of painting. This is most notable in JMW Turner’s work; he famously became more abstract over time, consistent with this fear above that the photograph would take over the more utilitarian elements of his craft.
Third, despite the initial skepticism, photography did become an art form, and there is every likelihood that today’s “AI art” will eventually become art, too. Though this is easier to picture in painting, no pun intended, I could imagine an art form centered on fictional characters set in GPTs, where the attraction is precisely that you don’t know the whole story, and you have to quiz the character to learn it.
The human element
But what exactly does a human writer bring to the table that AI cannot, especially if AI art may one day be art? At the risk of pushing my parallel too hard, psychologists Latto and Harper suggest two critical differences in photography and painting, which have strong corollaries to how we think about writing.2
First, our brains automatically focus on what we’re looking at, taking other things out of focus so that our attention is concentrated on the important objects. Photography struggles with this, however, frequently bringing the entire picture into focus rather than the object we care about. Consequently, a photograph can be more helpful - it can show us more than we would see if we were present, but, in doing so, it shifts our focus from the thing we care about to the landscape or scene as a whole.
Good writing closely reflects this. The mark of an excellent storyteller is their ability to guide the reader through the tale, showing them everything relevant and nothing else so that the reader’s focus never shifts. Similarly, a strong non-fiction writer brings important questions to the readers’s attention and tells them about the issue or topic but only what is relevant. In so doing, the writer identifies the important objects for the reader to focus on and guides the reader to see them more clearly. While LLMs can summarize information and predict the most likely thing to be said, that is not the same as having the value judgment to hone in on what is critical to the message being conveyed.
Second, Latto and Harper note that when we view an object, our brains automatically calibrate for the distance to give us a sense of perspective. Hence, when we see someone from a distance, we don’t assume they are six inches tall, we recognize that they are just a long way away. Photographs remove this context, however, making it much harder to understand relative size. The results can be comical - social media sites like r/confusing_perspective often highlight extreme cases for the confusion and humor they create. This is also why we say that the camera “adds 10 pounds” - by bringing us closer without giving us that sense of perspective, everyone looks fatter (the authors’ words, not mine - a lot’s changed since 2007).
Here, too, there are close connections to writing and LLMs. LLMs do not have an innate sense of perspective; they know only what is in the prompt. Being able to guide the LLM to something useful takes a lot of knowledge and expertise about the task and how to do it (presumably, something Qudan knows well). This is most obvious if you ask LLMs to make a life choice for you - they cannot do this (and are often programmed not to by their creators). But, similarly, they cannot tell you how a story should end, what moral claim your argument should make, or even what pieces of evidence in an argument are most vital - these all require a sense of perspective that LLMs do not have.
Where does this leave us?
Coming down from these abstract heights, LLMs are a bit like “choose-your-own-adventure” (CYOA) books. The great thing about CYOA books is that you can force the characters to make your own decisions and have the endings you feel they deserve. But the downside is that you are now telling the story, not the author. While you might pick up a CYOA book from an unknown author, you would never ask Dickens or King to let you choose the ending - the whole point of reading their book is that you want them to guide you! Similarly, people wishing non-fiction writers could be replaced by an LLM miss that a book’s structure is critical to its message. To understand Aristotle, you do not want to quiz him; you want him to tell you what you need to know to understand him, which is to say that you need to read his work.
That said, much like we would never consider hiring a painter to document a peace land in a real estate deal, GenAI will undoubtedly take over some aspects of writing, particularly those that are most utilitarian. Law firms are already learning that LLMs are good at writing wills and other boilerplate forms. Similarly, summarizing the outcomes of sports games and writing advertising copy is likely to be on the chopping block. Perhaps most concerningly, if we’re honest, much of the media we consume is fairly predictable and could be done by an algorithm: Buzzfeed lists and even Marvel comic scripts are likely to see substantial impacts from GenAI.
But, the challenge faced by the writing community is to be more creative, however, not to fight technological progress that shows us our weaknesses. As the parallels to photography illustrate, writers should see this moment as a time to be more creative, more suggestive, and less descriptive, and, most importantly, to tell their own stories. This, ultimately, is the “value add” of writers, not the summarization of facts. Though this will, in some ways, limit the field, hopefully, much like Turner himself, it will allow us to do the work we will be known for.
Rooseboom, Hans, and John Rudge. "Myths and Misconceptions: Photography and Painting in the Nineteenth Century." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 32, no. 4 (2006): 291-313.
Latto, Richard, and Bernard Harper. "The Non-Realistic Nature of Photography: Further Reasons Why Turner Was Wrong." Leonardo 40, no. 3 (2007): 243-247.