If You Can't Beat Writer's Block Without AI, Then Maybe You Shouldn't Be a Writer

I said what I said.

These days, it’s impossible to open up Twitter or peruse the news without hearing about AI, particularly ChatGPT and its offshoots, all of which are very much the obsession of the moment. Writers of every stripe–but particularly those, like myself, who freelance for a variety of companies–are rightly concerned that outlets, hungry for cheap content, will start laying off their writing force. After all, why bother paying living people when you can hire fewer people to just feed prompts into a machine? In fact, this is already happening at companies like BuzzFeed, but they will surely only be the first of many companies to take this route.

As pernicious as this is, however, what I find particularly distressing–and, frankly, infuriating–is the way that this technology is being touted as a way for people to bypass or elude the very process of writing itself. One product, called Sudowrite, claims to be an AI writing partner that will help you overcome writer’s block, allowing those who were formerly stymied in their ambitions to write the opportunity to do so. There have even been anecdotes of users crying tears of joy at finally being able to realize their ambitions, now that they can just feed some ideas into a system and have it craft the beats of their story for them. Writer’s block need no longer hamper anyone from becoming the writer they were always destined to be. 

I call bullshit. 

I’ve long had a healthy bit of skepticism when it comes to the age-old problem of writer’s block. We all have days when it can feel like lifting a boulder to sit down at the computer and start writing but, if your livelihood depends on being able to produce a piece–whether it’s an article, a listicle, a short story, or a novel–working through that problem and just getting the job done is part and parcel of the profession. If you have to lean on a chatbot to see you through this, then I have some very blunt words for you: you’re not a writer. And yes, I definitely mean that.

Any writer will tell you that the struggle is part of what makes a writer well, a writer. It takes effort to sit down at the computer–or, if you’re stubbornly old-fashioned, to set pen to paper–and sit there, hour after hour, as you contend with all of the moving pieces that go into any creative effort. Struggle isn’t necessarily a sign that one is being oppressed or stymied by some amorphous force though, of course, it does take a fair amount of privilege to devote to one’s craft. In fact, when it comes to acts like writing, the best results emerge precisely because you had to struggle to get there. Not to get too poetic about it, but I do think there’s a certain kind of magic that happens when you actually put in the physical effort to write something. Outsourcing that to an AI robs you of that valuable opportunity, denying a key part of what makes the act of creation so fulfilling to those who have made it their livelihood.   

Some have argued–either implicitly or explicitly–that there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about the act of creation itself. From their point of view, Sudowrite and its ilk are little curiosities, and they have no time for the panic that has been seething in much of the writing community. To this way of thinking, AI-produced content is no different than the hackjobs that so many writers have produced over the years. To me, though, this is a gross mischaracterization. Even the most banal form of writing, whether a listicle or a piece of “trashy” fiction, still has at least a vestige of the humanity that went into its creation. 

Programs like ChatGPT and Sudowrite hold out the promise that, if you just have ideas that you have what it takes to be a writer. The truth, though, is far more brutal. Though it might be a bitter pill for some to swallow, it does take some bit of actual talent in order to truly succeed as a member of the creative profession. Of course, it also takes a number of other things: luck, connections, the time to actually do the creative thing that you love. But to pretend that somehow ChatGPT and its many cousins are somehow going to throw open the doors to a legion of content creators who have just never been able to get over the hump of writer’s block is, to my mind, to be willfully obtuse. What it will do instead is to flood an already saturated market with work that is even more subpar. If you’ve ever read anything that’s been largely AI-generated, you know it’s about as interesting to read as a soup-can label.

More prosaically, I’m not even convinced that AI really makes the act of writing that much easier. From everything I’ve read, and from what I’ve experienced from playing around with the systems myself, it takes a frustrating number of prompts to yield the prose that you actually won’t. This begs the question: if I have to put in this much effort just to get the system to create what I want, why shouldn’t I just write it in the first place?

To me, this whole AI craze smacks of the usual Silicon Valley-driven speculation that afflicts us every few years. If the tech bros have shown us anything, it’s that they’re masters at reinventing the wheel (see also: the creation of “liquid trees”). Desperate to prove their relevance, and to get ahead of their competitors, they feed into our never-ending desire to participate in our own obsolescence. While I might be proven wrong in the future, I truly do think that readers (not consumers), do want to have at least a bit of a connection to the people responsible for writing the things they read. There’s something comforting about knowing that someone put something of themselves into the thing your eyes are perusing, whether it’s a listicle or a novel.

We owe it to ourselves, both as readers and as writers, not to give that up.