Where did all the writers go?

Abundance is the root of dullness. We find scarcity interesting, we uphold scare items and concepts, scarcity is somehow “authentic”, it is valueable. Before the age of mass machine manufacturing, machine produced goods were considered interesting, they were used as signals of authenticity. Yet, as mass production was generalized, cheapened, and democratized, world has seen a turn back to specialized goods. Hand-crafted items became evermore looked upon; today, unique products that “nobody else has” are more expensive, valuable, and appreciated than ever.

What does this have to do with writers though? The tech native reader might have guessed, it’s the rise of generative AI, the so-called Large Language Models like GPT, LLaMA, PaLM. I argue that even before the rise of automated writers, we had copy-cats that served a similar purpose, yet the automated writers pose a much more challenging problem for the future of original content. Let me provide more context into this claim, and explain what the problem actually is.

Writing, an endeavor as old as civilization itself, underwent many transformations throughout history. From being a tool available only to the powerful ruling class, it is today the most crucial communication channel. We are at a point where many people read and write more than they talk or listen throughout their daily lives. One important problem with writing is though, it is a primarily unattributed form of communication, let’s say compared to giving a speech, or doing a painting. One’s words are so easily cut out of context and pasted elsewhere without any hassles. Any reader might steal some quotes of mine, and present them as they are original. This is different for a speech, where the speechwriting is only half of the work, the delivery is many times impossible to copy. For a painting, it is hard to crop just a part you like, as paintings are usually meaningful as a whole, rather than a set of parts tucked together.

Another avenue of this problem is that it’s rather hard to claim authorship. If my words are paraphrased, who am I to say that my work was stolen; after all “there is only a few new under the sun”. What if my ideas were stolen and the writing was new, does that mean that person has written something original? Even worse, what if nobody cares if anything is authentic and original? What if people just praise what they see? What hope do we have for incentivizing young talents who would like to write?

I have been babbling, I shall come to the point.

For some time, I had realized this trend across Twitter. People pick up popular tweets, and they sometimes paraphrase it, sometimes translate it, sometimes keep it as is. They just post it as though it’s their original ideation, knowing full well that it’s going to be popular as they already observed. This has made my Twitter experience worse, seeing the same tweet many many times across different accounts, but even more importantly, I just felt that our current value systems disincentivize originality. Original work is hard to produce, it is hard to be appreciated for it, it is hard to stay motivated to continue. Picking up popular stuff and copying them around is so much easier, as we know already happens around. One aspect of this situation that sparked my hope was that I also saw pushback around this type of behavior. Although replications of popular tweets were still liked and popular, I saw people complaining about them, I saw criticizing responses. This, to me, meant that people still value original content, that they would uphold content that is original over the copy-cat.

With the rise of generative AI, I view another future avenue of problems, as many others have. Generative AI has given the copy-cats a very powerful tool, evading detection. One important aspect of writing is that the longer the piece, the easier it is to claim authorship and ownership. If I tried to publish someone else’s book under my name, I would get laughed out and I would potentially be liable against some lawsuits coming my way even if I was only stealing some chapters of the book. Copying paragraphs, even sentences is an act of academic dishonesty, it is without question plagiarism. So, these copy-cats mostly have copied tweets until now, where some tried automated paraphrasing and translation tools for stealing blog-posts, failing to feel authentic most of the time. Yet, tools like ChatGPT is able to capture ideas provided to them via some prompt, and act as convincing automated writers. Although the initial iterations of these tools still have shortcomings, many future versions await us. Using better prompts, better feedback strategies, bundling several tools together, learning to take advantage of small quirks of these programs that allow them to create more and more convincing texts, these copy-cats will become better than ever in their efforts for stealing ideas, and presenting them as their own. They will create automated systems that act like humans, open up social media accounts that use different strategies for growth, and the automation will allow them to scale more than they ever could have imagined before.

Although all of these are rather wild conjectures of my imaginations, I believe they are very real possibilities. So, in a world with these automated copy-cat agents all around us, what do we do? Where do all the writers go?

I believe there are two potential paths, perhaps walked at the same time. One of them is, we are unaware of this reality. These agents “walk” among us, and we interact with them without even realizing. This is a scenario where originality would lose its uphill battle against the copy-cats. It would be hard to get noticed amongst these giant entities, acting as they are mere content generators, copying every single original idea you have before any person actually reads your writings. Going even further, they might just blend many ideas from different piece into a new writing, preventing you from making any claim of ownership against them. The second path is, we as the society realize this phenomenon. We take plagiarism seriously. We value our originals and creators, we value their intellectual property, and we take steps for tracking and banning plagiarism, create effective social mechanisms for punishing plagiarizers and rewarding our originals. My hope for this second scenario stems from a fact I have articulated in the beginning. Abundance is boring. This scenario appeals to the human instinct to seek and value original, look out for the scarce. I wonder if we are going to uphold our creators, so that one day we don’t ask “Where did all the writers go?”.