Why Serious Authors Must Not Listen to The General Advice of “Write Simple and Small”

H. Should Authors Be Afraid of AI?

Today generative AIs are becoming popular with each passing day and more and more content is being created by AI tools. Many ghostwriters and copyrighters are losing their jobs and earnings to AI tools. Therefore can any discussion on writing be completed without considering the effect of AI on writing?

For instance, read the recent news item in a leading business daily in India that highlights how a 22-year old student lost her income from content due to AI.

It is quite obvious then for any aspiring or existing authors to think and ask “Should I at all be writing? Is writing at all a viable career? Can I earn bread and butter for my family through writing? Will AI not replace me?”

In order to answer this insecurity and fear of your brain, I would use the example from my life and the theory that I practice.

I observed if two or more people could do one thing, there was always a machine that came along to do it.

Hotels can make Palak Paneer across the globe, but only a passionate partner can cook Sorshe Ilish for her man, and no machine in the world can replicate that taste.

In the same way, a generative AI depends upon a large language model(LLM), where anything that gets created is merely contextual, informational, or like a simple process summary. Because the AI doesn’t have emotions, and it did not have to invest its life, in solving problems that threatened its life, the language model-based generations will be the variations like “Human body is 70% water.”

In this article, we saw Luther King’s way of making people understand and accept a narrative that was against their very belief system. Whether one should write a small article, a simple one, or a more complex article that one is emotionally invested in had nothing to do with Martin Luther, but his story would help you understand the current theory better.

Such a correlation of subjects and stories from other domains is called a Lateral and abstract correlation. It is the depth of the neural network which spreads like the root of a tree in the ground, far wider, far deeper. Such abstract and lateral correlations happen when one is creating neural network models while solving life’s challenges all along.

large Language Models(LLM) are literal. In a language model, “The sun is brighter than the moon” means the celestial star is brighter and radiates more energy than Earth’s satellite moon. However, if in the current context, I presented this line to you, your brain can interpret “Sun is brighter than the moon” in many ways:

1. Large articles are more powerful than small articles.
2. One who has more knowledge will be able to shed more light on a subject than the one who borrows the learning from other experts like the moon shines from the sun’s energy.
3. Anything that has more gravity will keep people attracted to it, and one with less gravity will orbit around the planets or masses.
4. Your brain may go further deep and associate as more pH means more Hydrogen atoms, and Sun has more Hydrogen, one who has more water would be able to produce more attractive essays.
5. Your brain can further correlate because children are born with 75% water, if an author becomes child-like, he will have more water, and therefore more Hydrogen and therefore more energy and gravity.
6. Shedding light on a subject like the way moon shows light in the dark may not be enough, you need to provide energy to act also to people like the sun.

There may be a whole lot of different ways your brain can interpret the sentence, and these interpretations and their depth will depend upon how severely you are affected by the subject.

Because your brain is not commanded, and directed to believe a statement like “Sun is brighter than the moon,” and because it invested its cognitive ability to discover the meaning that is relevant to your life, it will be satisfied by the discovery and the gradual cognition process.

If you understand that an AI doesn’t have emotions, abstract thinking, gradual discovery, or contextual abstractions and depends only on the literal meaning of a context and that writing is all about helping a reader to arrive at his/her conclusion rather than presenting opinions and forcing a world-view down their throat, then you know that AI can not do what you can do.

While writing this article, I am putting myself in your shoes, imagining you as an author, understanding your mind, your fear, and insecurities, and guiding your mind through the gradual process of discovering the truth. Therefore I am connecting to you emotionally, even though I do not know who is that you who is reading this article at this moment. In the same way, you may also experience an emotional connection with the author, that is me because your brain is becoming increasingly happy as it is reading this article if it has been able to read up to this point.

I am relying on my human instincts and my emotional energy to connect to the readers I don’t even know and the article is flowing through that emotional energy, guided by that emotion. I am pouring all my passion into the subject as I am also an author. I am feeling your pain, and I am trying to overcome that pain myself.

That is why, human authors would beat the AI-generated content hands down in terms of its impact, emotional connection, creating human values like trust and belief, giving satisfaction, and encouraging greater investment in time, money, energy, and emotions. Those who are using AI to generate content are only concerned about their own ease and producing a large number of content for a large amount of the population, forgetting the laws of devolution completely. They are putting their future generations into survival threats because they are doing something for the sake of monetary benefit, rather than being passionate about helping others with the ideas, stories, and theories that have benefitted themselves.