I've been noticing a recurring debate among writers: pro-AI vs. anti-AI. But here's my take.
Think about what happened when photography was introduced. Anyone could pick up a camera, but that didn't kill painting. It actually did two things: it made visual capture more efficient and accessible, AND it pushed painters to become true specialists. The best painters didn't disappear. They became more intentional, more skilled, more valued.
I think AI is doing the same thing to writing. Those who choose not to use it are going to rise to the top as the best of the best, pure craftspeople. Those who do use AI tools are going to become highly efficient and still produce great work. Either way.
Here's the thing... You misunderstand the nature of LLMs and how they work, and are using an improper analogy to try to justify them.
For our purposes, we'll focus on LLMs, the current AI type everyone is talking about as there are and have been many other varieties. LLMs are nothing more than over-complicated messes of decision trees with arbitrarily weighted paths (statistical percentages) that the computer then rolls dice against to figure out which arbitirarily captured sequence of bits (tokens) it should spit out. There's no cognition. There's no understanding. There's no innovation happening. It's just reguritating scraps of what it has digested.
The take aways from this:
1. The person prompting the AI has no real involvement in what happens with the generation of the output.
2. The LLM needs source material to have anything to output. It needs to not only tokenize data, it needs to see examples to construct the weighted paths in the decision trees it generates.
3. The LLM is confined to what it has seen and nothing else.
I work with Ph.D. researchers in generative AI fields and have designed and built their GPU research servers and workstations. I've read the papers behind LLMs. Do they have a place in the world? Yes. Is it anywhere the TechBros keep pushing? HELL NO. It's just the latest grift, since NFTs tanked.
Now, taking your photography vs painters example, pointing out a few issues...
Most painters weren't valueable until after they died. Most remained pretty destitute and hopeful to have a rich patron one day.
"The best painters didn't disappear."- Not that great of a statement, since we only know of the painters that were the most prolific and discovered. Survivorship bias happening here.
"They became more intentional, more skilled, more valued." - Nope. Just read up about the lives of most famous painters in the day. Most were treated like garbage by their patrons, even with photograhpy existing. In fact most art today is only valued as a way to laundry money and help with tax evasion for the super rich.
Early photography was a VERY laborious and expensive process, and pretty hit or miss on the quality. So, it didn't really challenge painting for quite some time, and by then... Painting was someonthing old the rich paid for anyway, even back in the day.
Now, discussing the general comparison between photography... More issues...
Photography still requires significant human involvement to produce anything. You have to pick the subjects, pick the place, setup the lighting, figure out which lenses to use, decide the composition of the scene, arrange the subject matter, set exposures, set appatures, and so forth. Then if you are doing film photography, there's type of film, running the developing process (which has multiple stages depending on if it's color of black and white), exposing the film properly, getting the enlarger right, and hoping you time everything correctly. That's not mentioning a huge amount of clean up, too.
Painting actually has similar human involvement. The capture processes are different... BUT... Both require significant human involvement and decisions to create the final product. The human is deciding in either processes to shape and mold the end product.
LLMs remove the human element completely. You just let a machine roll virtual dice with your prompt as some kind of less than random initial starting point in the mass of decision trees within the LLM. That's it. There's nothing more to it.
And if you look at what LLMs are doing for writing and art... It's just flooding the market with slop. It was hard for regular people to get noticed for their writing and art, and now it's even HARDER and getting worse. All that LLMs are doing is doing what mass produced crap goods have done for centuries: Flood the markets with quantity to the point it crowds out quality, makes it hard to find quality, and forces quality producers to leave the market because they can't get the attention and income they need to continue. This is and has been happening in writing and art communities since LLMs got to certain point. What's more, you have scammers protraying themselves as regualr artists shilling AI slop for cut rate prices, driving actual artists out of business.
Ever wonder why consumer appliances are garbage now? Because other companies started slapping out cheaper, worse made crap at cut-rate prices, lowering the average price point, and quality makers had to lower their standards to lower prices to get closer to that new average price point. Then, those quality brands get sold to (or bought after bankruptcy by) cheaper producers, and crap gets relabeled as the prior quality brand.
So the whole "Those who choose not to use it are going to rise to the top as the best of the best, pure craftspeople." point is demonstrably FALSE. And "Those who do use AI tools are going to become highly efficient and still produce great work." also incorrect. Yes, those that use LLMs are going to become highly efficient, but it they will not generate great work. They will mass dump it to try to make money via confusion and market flooding.
I would recommend reading up about recent history when it comes to capitalism.
Back to original analogy...
Painting and Photography are processes that allows the involved human to express themselves by the nature of process itself.
LLMs are systems that take existing materials and output less than random data based on that existing material with minimum human involvement, certainly not to any degree to allow expression outside of what the LLM has within it and rerolling outputs.
Photography never supplanted painting, because they serve different end goals, purposes, and aestetics. They were never a challeneger to the other.
Current popular LLM use is DESIGNED to supplant, subvert, and remove people from writing and art.
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