Where will young writers learn their craft in the age of AI.
I have been thinking of the impact of AI on young people as they leave school or Further Education and look for work in the creative industries.
If adoption of AI continues as a trend across the economy, how will young people gain the necessary experience to progress in their careers?
Many theatre professionals I have interviewed learnt about their trade as part of a community of practice, learning on the job. I have mainly learnt by being in the rehearsal room with experienced people, watching and trying to learn how they approach the work. The SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023 and some important surveys by organisations such as the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and ALCS tells us that there is pressure on these experienced writers which may interrupt this transmission of learning.
In a Writers' Guild of Great Britain survey (from 2023) :
65% of respondents said they believed that the increased use of AI will reduce their income from writing, whilst 61% were worried that AI could replace jobs in their craft area(s).
There is another Writers' Guild paper called Using generative AI as a research and writing tool : the risks, It shows that the current landscape is extremely complex. As ChatGPT is currently being sued by the Authors' Guild in the US, material generated could run the risk of falling foul of this i.e you could run the risk of breach of copyright. There could also be a chance that the material generated doesn't belong to you. There are many unknown unknowns.
On writing to the algorithm
Let's talk about the flattening of voice and some other strange expressions of how algorithms are shaping content.
When the book Save the Cat came out, there was apparently an uptick in the amount of films that followed the formula suggested in the book. (And it is a formula. By page 11 you should do this. By page 22 do this.) That's positively glacial compared to how writing and creating content to the algorithm is affecting the content we consume online.
Here is a BLDG BLOG post on where thinking like an algorithm is taking us and what is lost.
Geoff Manaugh
He points to an article by author James Bridle called Something is wrong on the internet, which talks about how this is happening at scale in video for young people. He says "In brief, the essay suggests that an increasingly odd, even nonsensical subcategory of children’s video is emerging on YouTube"
Here is just one example of the weirdness.
A second way of increasing hits on videos is through keyword/hashtag association, which is a whole dark art unto itself. When some trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches critical mass, content producers pile onto it, creating thousands and thousands more of these videos in every possible iteration. This is the origin of all the weird names in the list above: branded content and nursery rhyme titles and “surprise egg” all stuffed into the same word salad to capture search results, sidebar placement, and “up next” autoplay rankings.
Is this what we want? I love this quote from the BLDG BLOG article. Don't we prefer this?
One of many things I love about writing—that is, engaging in writing as an activity—is how it facilitates a discovery of connections between otherwise unrelated things. Writing reveals and even relies upon analogies, metaphors, and unexpected similarities...These sorts of relations might remain dormant or unnoticed until writing brings them to the foreground: previously unconnected topics and themes begin to interact, developing meanings not present in those original subjects on their own.
The importance of practice-based learning for writers
In the book 'Expert', by the surgeon Roger Kneebone, he argues that this apprentice phase is extremely important. It's an essential step on the journey to master something. He divides the phases into - apprentice : journeyman : master.
"When you start out, your role is to learn. You are in someone else's world, learning to do things their way, and they take responsibility for what you do... You are shielded from the mistakes you will inevitably make.... You become part of a community of practice, a group of people already doing what you aspire to learn."
The Challenge: AI and Devalued Labour
That community of practice is under increasing pressure. There can be productivity gains when using these tools (I've written about this in... how to leverage AI in your lifelong learning journey. ). But the distribution of rewards, at the moment, is leaning towards making writing an even more difficult career path.
Erosion of copyright is a huge issue - with the Government pursuing the 'opt-out' model during the Copyright & AI Consultation process.
One where writers, creators and other rights holders will need to reserve their rights, or ‘opt-out’, to stop AI companies from accessing the work and using it to train their models.
The ALCS Chair, Tom Chatfield, wrote about an ALCS’s survey of over 13,000 writers (N.B this link opens a pdf),
77% don’t even know if their works have been used to train AI systems. Among those who do know, only 7% gave permission. And a remarkable 91% felt they should be asked for permission to use their works.
Behind these statistics lies a fundamental imbalance in how creative work is valued and respected in an algorithmic age. While tech companies rush to train ever-larger systems on vast libraries of human-made content, its creators are neither consulted nor compensated.
In the same survey, writers were very keen to engage with the issue and find solutions. I'll certainly be trying to be better informed about how AI will affect writers and the writing itself.
I'll finish with this quote from Roger Kneebone. He says that the opportunity to become an expert should be "one our inalienable rights..."
It's how we fulfill our potential as human beings. Yet the slow process required is at odds with demands for instant gratification. There's a growing sense that anyone can learn to do anything - and quick. But that's not the case. Becoming an expert involves sticking at something for much longer than you normally would. It requires...guidance and encouragement, exposures to mistakes, opportunities for spending time with your materials and the people you work with, and allowing your personality to unfold.
Let's hope the ladder isn't pulled up on young people before it's too late.
I've written a post on The Freelance Artist’s Survival Guide: Tax, Invoicing, and Health which I hope is helpful.