Will AI Ever Replace Human Authors?

This is a fear I’ve heard expressed by a couple young writers within my circles — that AI will make their jobs obsolete.

But will it?

Can it?

People’s opinions on this are all over the place. Some see this as the start of the apocalypse, others like another Industrial Revolution that will eliminate jobs but will ultimately be for the better. Still others scoff and point out it simply isn’t possible with how AI works right now — but could it work years and years in the future when we have better coding and more data?

I’m going to make the case that AI will never replace human authors, no matter how much it progresses technologically. It may try to compete, but it will never replace. Might it make our job harder and our markets fuller? Sure. But that’s nothing new. KDP did just that, on a smaller scale, and audiences adapted, learning how to recognize a homemade cover or a badly-written blurb that hints this might just be someone’s hastily jotted-down, unedited vanity story.

I believe AI-written novels will be the same way. Human beings will always be smarter than their creations, and we’re going to be able to tell when something is AI-written. The language will feel fake, the storylines will be predictable, and the cover illustration is probably going to have three hands and twenty fingers. 😜

That’s just how AI works. Its algorithms scan all the data available to it and find the most common, predictable solutions, in the hopes that it will be right. But all it’s going to do is write a story composed entirely of tropes, if you ask it to write you a novel. It’ll see what’s out there, see what’s done the most often, and replicate it.

It’ll also probably do it with a distinctly woke bent, given who builds most of the chatbots out there.

An AI will never be the next Shakespeare, inventing his own words and turns of phrase. An AI will never even be the next John Smith, because John Smith has a distinct way of talking and writing that AI will never be able to perfectly mimic. John Smith is creative.

AI is not.

Maybe AI can duplicate John Smith’s habit of using food-related metaphors or his tendency to sprinkle his dialogue with cultural slang. But John Smith is constantly growing and changing, and if he’s reading well like an good author should, he’s adding new words to his vocabularly. John Smith is also living life, and his experiences color his word choices. If John Smith just went through a car wreck and then describes a similar accident in his story, those words are going to simmer with realism and emotion, because there’s a human behind them.

AI can’t top that.

AI can’t even research like a human.

True story — I was preparing for a debate several months back and had been scouring the internet for days, trying to find snappy quotes from our founding fathers to have on hand as exordiums and rebuttals. But the internet being the woke-corporation-controlled internet, and my subject being very not woke, I was having a difficult time of it. And so, out of desperation I turned to Bing’s Copilot chatbot and told it exactly what I wanted, in the hopes it might somehow route around the woke things Google kept bumping to the top of its results.

It gave me a list of quotes. These were better, but still not quite what I needed. I requested more.

It gave me one of the same quotes it had given me earlier — only this time, it said it was not by Thomas Jefferson, but by Barrack Obama.

I had to laugh. It was so ridiculously wrong. Obama would never say a thing like that and I have no idea how the stupid AI got that mixed up.

The quote was by Thomas Jefferson, by the way. An independent online search of multiple sources confirmed that. So even Google was doing a better job of bringing up helpful answers to my research question.

I informed the chatbot it was wrong, and it thanked me for helping it learn. It promised to fix itself — only to repeat the mistake when I made the request again.

This is why I pretty much never use AI for book research. The most I’ll do is use it as a launching point (an unavoidable one since AI is the first thing that pops up for most subjects, and I was doing just fine researching without it) — and anything that seems odd or suspicious, I make sure to verify with human-made sources. These days it’s getting harder and harder to avoid, especially since Google added its AI overview feature. But at least that isn’t inventing answers — it’s usually linked to articles, and I verify what the AI says by reading actual articles and sources.

And the issue isn’t just AI’s constant habit of inaccuracy.

If AI can’t even tell me what a woman is, why on earth would I use it to research my novel? An author needs accurate research to help audiences suspend disbelief and to create a sense of realism. We’ve seen how much the woke world is trying to rewrite history. What if an AI programmer decides that some certain facts about America’s founding or the history of the church are… inconvenient, or opposed to his worldview? Well, he’ll leave it out, change it, or give AI some useless nothing-burger spiel to say. If I’m using AI to research, well then, I’m gonna have a problem.

I don’t even like to use it for marketing. I’ve tried an AI back-cover-blurb improver. It couldn’t improve. It just replaced a couple of my words with synonyms and rearranged sentences in a way that made it different but not better. I’ll learn how to write marketing copy from examples — and maybe sometimes AI is one of those, but I’m never gonna copy-paste. No siree, my words must be mine.

I don’t really get a choice on whether or not AI powers my blog’s statistics or my word processor’s grammar-checker. And hey, now and then when I want it to do boring market research on comp titles, short story publishers, or just give me combinations, I’ll do that. But as best I can, I will not let AI interfere with my design and calling.

Ultimately, the most important reason why AI will never be able to replace human beings is because we are made in the Image of God. We have the Creation Mandate.

We are the one creature on this planet that has constant creativity and is forever inventing new things, or new versions of things. I go deeper into the subject here. We have the ability to touch other hearts through our intentionally-crafted words, through shared experience, and through a story that draws on the themes and lessons that have defined our life.

An AI doesn’t create with intentionality. It finds the simplest answer, the easiest route. AI cannot share experience with a human. It has no personality, no soul, no life. An AI cannot understand abstract concepts or meaningfully teach a message.

Humans are creative beings. An AI is neither a being, nor creative. It is just a byproduct of our other creations, and it’s coming to be a sort of Babel representing man’s attempts to transcend the created order and become a god.

Work isn’t always fun. Most of the time it isn’t. But there is something so deeply satisfying in having toiled long and well, having learned through dilligence, instead of just flinging our question lazily off onto a robot to do the work for us.

Yes, I am firmly against using AI in any part of the writing process, even if that’s doing the work of producing marketing copy or editing or those other not-so-enjoyable tasks. Why? Because I want to learn. Because I want to have a full knowledge of what I’m doing for my career and how I’m doing it. Because I want to be authentic and have a personal touch. Because I can edit my work better than any AI bot out there so far (this is not to say I’m good at editing. It’s just saying the bots don’t edit; they rearrange and apply every generalized rule about writing to every situation, most of which don’t fit.) I’ve tried the Hemingway program and I know the rules of grammar better than that thing. I’ve studied, and I know my voice and the intention of my work, and I can detect nuance. AI can’t. AI will try to remove every single use of the passive voice in my work. Well, now and then the passive voice is required. Perhaps I’m purposefully writing in an older style, or the subject is purposefully unclear to the eyes of the POV character. AI will try to take out every adverb in the piece — which is lunacy. Specificity and clarity are vital characteristics of a good story. Sometimes there just aren’t verbs or nouns to describe what I mean, and horror of horrors, one must use an adverb.

I refuse to use AI for brainstorming as well. Again, all it does is predict. It takes its vast sample of information (which may include the pirated works of other authors) and generalizes. Finds the common denominator. I don’t want a trope or a boring, predictable answer. I want out-of-the-box thinking and the perfect thing for my story, my message, my character. Only I, or another human who’s been deeply involved in the process with me, can figure that out. AI can’t. I don’t want to stunt my creative abilities by not creating and not using my brain.

I mean, if I told you that AI came up with some particular plot twist in my story, wouldn’t it make you cringe, and some part of you regard me as lazy? Or if I took an AI’s word as gospel without even consulting other, human-made sources to make sure there was in fact truth to it, (at least, at this point in AI’s accuracy track record,) might you think I’m dumb?

If we’re already getting human-made stories that stick too rigorously to templates or are only reheated versions of the stuff we’ve seen before, and we hate it and can tell, don’t you think we’ll notice the inferiority of AI stories all the more?

There are people out there who tell authors they must learn how to incorporate AI into their writing process or they’ll be left in the dust.

But tell me — all the previous technological advancements we’ve had that streamline manufacturing processes or make them more convenient; do they eliminate demand for the genuine, handcrafted thing that took tedious hours to make?

No, not all the way. Plenty of people will be willing to compromise for cheapness and availability, but there will always be people who only want the real thing. We still have people who weave rugs by hand or mix, knead, and bake their own bread. Let me tell you, any time my friend bakes a loaf of sourdough for my family, it’s gone within two days because it tastes so good — and it’s healthier. In the same way, audiences will want the never-seen-before fictional worlds, the characters that are so alive they could leap off the page, the subtle but powerful theme that twists our hearts into knots, instead of the bland alternative. People will go out of their way to find the best stories. Even today there’s so much dissatisfaction with the movie industry because people aren’t bothering to be creative. What do you think audiences will do if human creativity is taken out of the process altogether?

And in the case of art, especially the difference between human art and transhuman ‘art,’ I think most audiences will still crave the human connection.

So, if AI replacing you is your fear, please remember this. Books written by humans have the incredible ability to reach other people and shine light into their lives — and only books written by humans, because only other humans have gone through struggles, temptations, grief, life changes, relationships, friendships, redemption, and everything else that we can bond over because we’ve experienced it too. You are a human being and creation is in your nature. You are creating for God and for those around you, and that is never a waste.

Think wisely about whether and how you use AI in your writing process. Me, I’m not gonna. The most I’ll ever use AI for is generating an image of my character or cover because I’m a visual person and that helps me as I’m laying out planning and outlining, or for the aforementioned time-saving tasks that have nothing to do with my actual stories and content. But that’s not in any way interfering with my process of creating and writing a story. Call me a technophobe all you want. It’s not going to hurt me because it’s not true. It’s not technology I hate. It’s evil. And trying to transcend the beautiful gift that is our God-given ability to create is evil. I hate those things that are man’s effort to search for salvation in technology. I hate the worldview that says man is just another stupid animal and that progress and technology will be our ascension, our self-directed next evolutionary step.

You have a soul. A personality. (AI does not have a personality. The most it can have is a quirky way of speaking programmed into it by a human.) You have a life, full of ups and downs and joys and heartbreaks but vibrantly and unmistakably real.

People will want to hear the stories you tell, when you tell them from a place of soul-level meaning and not trying to copy the rest of the world. When you tell them from a place of hard-fought, well-earned skill. When you tell them with a heart for your reader. When you forget what’s ‘popular’ and tell what’s awesome.

Dear author, you aren’t going to be replaced.

Dear reader, you may have to work a little harder to find good material. But what’s new?

‘We have something that no AI bot will ever possess: the image of God. That’s why connecting with a real human through art is so important. Art isn’t just beautiful–it also is a means by which we better understand the world. But because of the random nature of AI generation, the meaning that AI can give is only probabilities–not the meaning that comes from someone created in God’s image.’ ~ Josiah DeGraaf

You have nothing to fear. God is greater than any new change in the world. His purposes and His plans will come to fruition no matter what. Follow your calling.

Do not despair.

As Tolkien said, tend the land you are in. You know what the Lord requires of you.

Burn brightly, no matter how close the darkness comes.

Until next time,

Cheers.

For Further Reading: Is My Gen AI Work Responsible for Job Loss? Will AI Replace Writers? Here’s Why It’s Not Happening Anytime Soon Can AI replace writers in the future? Hillsdale – Transhumanism and AI Hillsdale – The Danger of Transhumanism Are You Ready For The AI Apocalypse?

BONUS:

A good article in a related vein: You Are Free From the Burden of Being Sovereignly In Control