The Post-Literate Future Will Lead to the Post-Creative Future

“This generation has no future, and deserves none.” That’s a diary excerpt by Rudolf Binding, a German officer who served on the Western Front during The Great War. The poet and novelist wrote that in August of 1918, four years into the catastrophe that changed the trajectory of western civilization. He was writing about the self-indulgence and depravity that characterized both the leadership and average soldier involved in the war.1 But he might as well have been writing about what we are going through today, as artificial intelligence replaces human intelligence.

Much has been written in response to the article by Rose Horwitch in the current Atlantic, titled, “The End of Reading Is Here.” But I’m more concerned about the end of creativity.

AI can already perform most basic writing functions. It can write music. It can create graphics and manipulate photography as well as many professional designers. It doesn’t do any of that very creatively, but then the average person can’t tell the difference.

If the average person can’t tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated art, then people and companies and corporations will use AI-generated art because it incurs no human costs, for example health or retirement benefits. It will be cheaper to create and just as effective in the opinions of the general population.

What started me thinking this way was another article in The Atlantic, about the self-published novel, Daggermouth, which became a best seller and was recently acquired by Simon & Schuster for a seven-figure deal. There is strong evidence that the novel was at least 60% written by AI, although the author, H. M. Wolfe, denies using AI. The article noted that the second-best-selling ebook in the Amazon data set is by an author who has 418 titles listed on the site.

Four hundred eighteen. There’s no way you could produce that many books without using AI. Even if you wrote three books a year, you’d have to start at birth and live to 139. There are other “authors” selling hundreds of AI-generated books on Amazon. The way Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service works, authors receive payment for the number of pages read. So if you have several hundred books and each gets a few pages read by a few people, you’ll make money. Throw in some phony or paid reviews that indicate positive reader response, and Amazon’s system will respond with better placement, and then you can make a lot of money.

Why bother to write anything truly creative if you can make money just asking AI to churn out a couple hundred pages of garbage and design a cover to match? You and I take writing more seriously than that, but it only takes a few greedy abusers to change the system, especially when the goal is not artistic excellence but simple monetary profit. Remember, the average reader usually can’t tell the difference. If they could, books like Fifty Shades of Grey and Theo of Golden would never have become popular. And AI has no trouble replicating bad books like that.

We’ve talked about the post literate future on this Substack in terms of people not reading and not understanding. Some cultural analysts and historians predict that civilizations that don’t read may revert to forms of oral culture. Such societies are often founded on superstition, distrust of science, fear of other people and new ideas, and worse. There are signs of this particularly in the United States, as reading standards continue to plummet.

In past times, it was elites who dictated what art was acceptable and should be popular. Love ’em or hate ’em, educated, wealthy patrons and church officials helped ensure the survival of fine art. The average person had little or no input. But now those dictates about taste come from the mass market, whose collective buying power drives the economy. Elites, as in CEOs and cultural icons, restrict their artistic tastes to what is popular to appease the mass market and make their fortunes from them.2 Major media have largely abandoned reviewing and critiquing fine art because it doesn’t serve the bulk of their audience. It’s no wonder that fine art, such as literary fiction, is nearly extinct. Many people now never encounter fine art in their lifetimes, but their opinions about art drive the market.

Let me pause for a moment to reiterate what I’ve said about AI previously. I use it almost every day as a research tool. I do not trust it to do research without error, and so I follow nearly every link and check everything that it offers. I am using it to create an app. But I do not use it to write or edit anything. I do believe that AI is an invaluable tool for the advancement of certain industries such as science and technology. Key word: tool. Not assistant or replacement. And a person using a tool ought to know how to use it properly. I do not believe AI provides anything valuable in terms of art, and I have never said so.

Let’s look a little further into that future. Allow me to speculate…

A lot of what passes for art now is no better than AI slop. But there’s always been room for fine art. What happens when the door to that room is closed? That’s what I call the post-creative future. It’s a world without serious artists. The “artists” of the future will mostly be people just programming AI to produce mediocre art to turn a profit. “Art” will roll off an assembly line. It will no longer challenge or excite anyone. It will become the wallpaper of our society, kind of like written or visual Muzak.

Young people will no longer aspire to be artists, because they’ll know it will not be them producing the art, but the AI assistant that they are forced to work with. Forced? Yes, because corporations will find a way to acquire the AI technology that produces almost all the art in our country, and they will provide most of the jobs in that field. With AI as the standard, more creative artists will be forced to abandon their more adventurous impulses to survive.

Right now, major publishing companies use a system of literary agents to find authors and produce their books. They have a staff of acquisition and production editors, as well as advertising people and publicists. But if AI can do the writing and the public can’t tell the difference, then they won’t need those authors or those agents. They will just package books for the mass market without the human component, saving them millions of dollars in costs. Eventually they will do away with their editorial staffs and possibly even their publicity people. Their major competition will be individual businesspeople, who find that they can churn out as many books as the big five. The only real difference is that the major companies will have much larger advertising budgets. The fact that S&S has already paid a million for a probably AI-generated book tells me they won’t hesitate to move in this direction. But they may lie about it.

Here’s where you’re going to tell me that independent publishers will step in and provide the kind of writing that has always been popular with more discerning readers. Individual visual artists, musicians, writers, and craftspeople will step in to continue to make art of quality. Maybe. But how long can they hold out? We’re not talking about filling in a gap in the market. We’re talking about virtually the entire market collapsing intellectually (already the average adult novel is written at the junior high school level). Academics and other opinion leaders are talking about how high rates of literacy among the public have only existed during the era in which printed books were the norm. That’s about 500 years. In human history, that is barely a moment in time. If that goes away, what makes you think that a love of fine art won’t disappear with it (if it isn’t already gone)?

Perhaps if fine art falls far enough out of favor it will be criminalized. Am I going too far? Think about Soviet Russia during the 20th century. How did they treat their writers and artists? Think about what some extreme politicians would like to do in this country. What would it take for our culture to resemble Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Atwood has said in interviews that she never really makes anything up, only exaggerates what already exists.

Can the protestations of a handful of dedicated artists forestall the inevitable demise of fine art? Every world-changing invention has had its detractors. But I can’t think of any that have been abandoned simply because some people wanted the world to cling to the old ways of doing things, or even if they point out new dangers inherent in the technology. Nuclear energy? They couldn’t stop that. Early automobiles were called “devil wagons” because people feared they would kill too many pedestrians. In fact, auto deaths still number in the tens of thousands in America each year, and we all still keep driving. At best, resistance can help eliminate some of the dangers inherent in the new technology. Like seatbelts in cars. (But even that took 70 years before it came to pass).

Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for when it comes to artificial intelligence. It may not kill us all, as some people have predicted. It may not harm us all, as many more suspect will happen. But the wonderful world of the future that AI promises is going to be awfully boring without the fine art that it will inevitably replace.

I hate to be a fatalist like Rudolf Binding. I have long held the position that AI will eventually replace many writers and artists, but that truly talented people will always have a place in our culture. Now, I’m not so sure. The human animal is incredibly changeable and adaptable. Sometimes I forget just how far people will go to ensure their self-interest, even at the expense of millions of other people. Those scam writers who produce hundreds of AI books that sell on Amazon have awakened me to a different possibility for the future, one that has forgotten the value of great art and writing.

I’m doing a little more traveling this week, and this time my ability to respond to comments will be greatly reduced, probably until Tuesday.

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Wall image by BRRT. Frame image by RaniRamli. Both from Pixabay. Design by me. No AI this time.