This Is Why AI Won't Ever Replace Real Writers

So Ben asks, I have a very specific writing style. In fact, I went to Berkeley largely in pursuit of authors who developed instantly recognizable prose. The best example would be the first paragraph of Lolita by Nabokov. Very weird timing. I literally just reread the first like 4 pages of Lolita like 2 nights ago before bed. I just saw it on my bookshelf and I was like, oh, I haven't read that in a long time. It's fantastic. So far I have A, never seen AI match this level of play, surprise, or delight. And B, never seen AI match my own voice, no matter how much of my actual writing I submit. Talk about this problem and what breakthroughs I think will happen with AI. So this will be a little philosophical. Here's, uh, something that I've been thinking about a lot lately as it relates to creative writing and the intersection of creative writing and AI. I think that people think that if you give AI enough material. So, okay, I give you 500 pages of my own writing style, you will write like me. And I think what gets— there's a lot that gets lost in that assumption because when you say, all right, I give you 500 pages of me, now write like me, what you're really saying is you're saying, AI, I want you to understand the nuances of every single subjective decision that I have made in all 500 pages that I've given you, and I want you to make creative choices that are subjective the same way that I would every time. Now, just to think about what, what that means, what I, what I just said, that means that let's say when you sit down to write, you're telling a story, and then all of a sudden your subjective intuition says, you know, as I'm talking about this character, my imagination's telling me they're actually wearing like a very specific type of sweater. And then, you know what, as I'm describing the sweater, my subjective intuition is telling me that it's actually the character's grandmother's sweater. And now I want to share a little bit about the history of the grandmother. And then my subjective creative imagination, now that I'm talking about the grandmother,— is making me realize that I want to put an object on the nearby dresser that then the character notices that reminds them of a memory of their grandmother. And as you start to go, you realize that creative writing is quite literally subjective decision after subjective decision, purely like what you are feeling in that moment. And so when you then ask AI, "Okay, do that," what you're really asking AI to do is to make subjective decisions the same way that you would every time. And the problem with that is, A, it's subjective, and B, it assumes that when you were making the decisions, you actually knew what you were doing. Most writers have no idea what they were doing. They're just sitting there writing going, "Well, and now I see a sweater and oh, whose sweater is that? That's my grandma's. And oh, what's the relationship to my grandma? Oh, here's a little backstory. And oh, that reminds me of a dresser." You are just following your mind's eye. And so when you ask AI to do that, you think that AI in every single individual opportunity, word choice, paragraph, decision, everything, makes the same subjective decision that you would, which is impossible. It will never do that. Now, that is different than will AI be able to write something really creative? Yeah, it will. It already can. Right. Will AI get better at writing creative things? Yes. Will AI get better at writing really compelling prose? Yes. Will AI get better at telling really interesting stories? Yes. Will, will AI get better and better at hiding the little AI-isms so that it sounds more and more human? Yes. All of those things are true. What is untrue is, will AI write pages and pages and pages of content that is 100% every single subjective decision that you would have made? And the answer is no, because fundamentally like art, if we're talking about creative writing, art is subjective choice after subjective choice. So I'll share an interesting idea that I've been thinking about lately. What is art? Art is, what is the, oh, competence plus choice. This is what I've been landing on lately, which is, this is the clearest I have yet to define this for myself. Art is competence, so being good at something, plus choice. Now, what does that mean? If I take this mug and I choose to call it art, is it art? If yes, why? If you said yes, why is this art? There's a famous designer, his name's Virgil Abloh. He was the creative director at Louis Vuitton for a while, and he was the founder of a brand called Off-White, passed away a couple years ago. He has this really great interview, and it's a clip that I think about several times a week. Like, it had such a profound impact on me where he said, you know, if I take this mug and I put this mug inside of a garage sale, is it art? The average person would say, well, no, if I found this on the table at a garage sale, I would just be like, yeah, it's a mug. You're charging me 50 cents for it, right? But if I take this mug and I put it inside of an all-white room on Beverly Hills Boulevard and there's nothing else in the entire room except this mug and it's sitting on a pedestal and there's a spotlight coming down on it, the same exact mug, is it art? And all of a sudden everyone goes, Yes, and I will pay tens of thousands of dollars for this mug. It's the same mug. What changed is context. And so he has this iconic point of view in this, in this interview, and I think about it all the time where he goes, I could spend a lot of time trying to make the perfect mug, or I could just change the room that the mug sits in. I could spend more time designing the room rather than the object itself. Fun fact, he ended up doing a lot of collaboration with Kanye. And I think about that a lot when I look at someone like Kanye's set design, for example. That is the epitome of designing the room, because if I design the room, it changes my perception of everything inside of it. So someone can be really competent, right? I could, I could be a skilled person, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I am creating art. I could just be good at this thing. Like, a debate I used to have with, with a friend of mine all the time in Chicago is like, is a copywriter an artist? Or like, if someone writes a really clever tagline for a brand, is that art? And I think where, where I've ultimately landed with it is, well, it's not just the skill of it, it's, it's also the choice of it. So I'll give you a counterpoint. I'm reading this book, I actually have it on my desk right now, I'm reading this book called Blindness. It's by José Saramago. He was a, I wanna say Portuguese, yeah, Portuguese writer. This won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. This novel breaks every single grammar rule you have ever learned about writing, ever. The entire novel is what my 4th grade English teacher called a bunch of comma splices, which is— it's tons of incomplete sentences, and it's a lot of like strung-together sentences with no break. And it either grammatically should have been a period or maybe a semicolon, and instead it's just commas, just comma comma comma comma comma. In addition to that, it breaks the rule of dialogue where when there's dialogue, there's no quotations. And the only way that you know a sentence has shifted into dialogue is that the first letter becomes capitalized. This is advanced literature, okay? So don't pick this up thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be some leisurely afternoon read." This is a mental workout. So it breaks the rules of grammar and sentence structure, it breaks the rules of dialogue, and the way that it combines the two is like— I've never really read a book like, like this before. Now, I love stuff like this, okay? The average person probably doesn't. What's my point in sharing this? My point is that all of this was a choice. It's not just that Saramago is a competent writer, it's that what makes it art is also intentional choice. Now, what's interesting and why people debate art so much, right? You go, you go to like an art festival or something, you know, like Miami has Art Basel. And they have paintings from artists all over the world, right? And you go to these things and people debate art. They're like, is that good? Is that bad? What is the meaning? Okay, what, what you're really doing in that moment, it's not that people are incompetent. Like when you go to these art festivals, like, yeah, you might not like it, but you're like, okay, yeah, but like this person made something I couldn't make it. So it's not just the competence part. What you're really debating is the choice. In this novel, Saramago chose, "I am not going to use quotations. I'm going to break that rule, and I'm going to do something different. I am not going to write complete sentences. I am going to string together long thoughts with a bunch of commas in a row." Okay? So these are choices. And what's interesting, first of all, is that choice is subjective. And second of all, You can really only make these choices if you are competent, right? You have to have some baseline level of competence in order to sit there and go, okay, let me come up with, with a compelling choice. And you have to have a reason for making that choice, right? And so I think going back to the original question of like, Well, will AI be able to write like me? That's a really hard— that's a hard milestone to reach, let alone even care about, because what you're really asking is, will AI— like, AI is competent. The competence isn't what we're talking about. It's that, will AI make every single choice the same way that I would? Every metaphor, are they going to use the same metaphor you would have picked? Every, every word and vocabulary choice, will AI pick the same word that you would have picked in that exact moment? Probably not. And it's not— and I think this is the most important part— is it's not even that your choice or AI's choice is one is better than the other. It's that they are both subjective choices. And so how could, how could you ever expect technology to make every single choice that you would make? Fun question. This is something I've been thinking about a lot. I do think that AI will get to the point where it can write very creative things. It already can write very creative things. I think AI can also present really unique choices, but I don't, I don't think unless we all implant chips in our brain where we become one with the technology, I really don't think that there's going to be this point where AI reads your mind and all of a sudden makes every single subjective choice that you would have made, because that would be impossible. By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.