How I Know that AI Won’t Replace Fiction Writers

Computers can do a lot of things. But they can’t feel.

Photo of a woman sitting on the floor by the bed, crying, with a book on the mattress. Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash

A couple of years ago a friend (and fellow novelist) joined Ninja Writers, my online writing school. He wanted to participate in one of our feedback workshops.

Basically — in these workshops everyone brings some of their work. They take turns reading out loud and getting feedback from the other writers in the Zoom room.

He participated a couple of times and I finally had to talk to him, privately. The gist of that conversation was something along the lines of — Dude, what in the hell is this?

His writing was strange. Hollow. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it was shallow somehow. All the parts were there, but it lacked depth. He got feedback along those lines every week, but brought back similar writing the next time.

Of course, people are at different points in their writing careers. And I wasn’t judging him. In fact, Ninja Writers was designed for new writers. It’s just that I could tell something was off, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

We were friends, so I could ask the dude, what the hell question of him in a way that I wouldn’t have asked a student. His answer was: AI wrote it and he wanted to see if he could make it pass a group of readers.

It took me about half an hour to understand what he was talking about. This was well before ChatGBT was a thing. I’d never heard of AI writing a novel before. Or fiction at all.

But he’d bought a program or an app or something. I can’t remember now what it was, except that he fed it ideas and it spit out stories. He told me that I needed to learn how to do it, too, because pretty soon I’d be out of a job. But I knew, right in that moment, that he was wrong.

AI will not replace human fiction writers.

Does that feel like famous last words? Oh, yes. Does it make me feel like I’m calling forth Skynet with the Ouiji board in my head? Uh huh. I have enough imagination to be able to clearly see a future where computers take over.

But I really don’t think that AI will replace human fiction writers.

Maybe we’ll get to a pace where some fiction is written that way. Where a computer generates stories for us. We already live in a world where it’s possible. It’s probably already happening.

AI has helped writers with grammar and spelling and predictively finished sentences for years and years. Writers already use AI, every day.

There are self-published writers out there churning out as many as twenty novels in a year. Wrap your head around that. It’s roughly the equivalent of a NANOWRIMO book every two and a half weeks. Only, instead of 50,000 words, they’re closer to 80,000 words long.

It’s nearly 5000 words a day, every single day. All. Year. Long. Could an AI replicate that business model? I suppose it’s possible. But it wouldn’t do it well enough to replace human writers in a meaningful way.

Because for someone to want to read twenty books a year from the same author, those books need to make them feel something. And AI can’t do that.

I knew that when my friend talked to me about it, because I’d just spent weeks wondering what in the hell was wrong with the work he was doing.

Writing is hard work. Insanely hard.

So hard that writers’ brains are constantly attempting to save them from it. Great new ideas pop up when we’re writing the second act. Every chore we’ve ignored since high school is suddenly imperative. Imposter syndrome makes us wonder why we’re trying at all.

I could ask ChatGPT to write me a story. And it would. But there is nothing, not a thing, that could make it write me a story filtered through my own human experiences.

No amount of inquiry or training or trying to teach it could do that. It would get the formula right. The beats would all be there. But it wouldn’t have heart.

This is what I knew when I talked to my friend.

There is no way that a computer could write To Kill a Mockingbird or The Hunger Games or For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Shining. Not prize-winning fiction. But also? Not the trashy romances that are my guilty pleasure. Not Stephen King-style super-commercial horror stories. Not young adult dystopia. Not a single one of the paperbacks on the rack at my local grocery store’s checkout counter.

Maybe AI generated fiction the literary equivalent of the uncanny valley.

Something very, very human like, but not human at the same time, is unsettling. AI generated fiction is right down there in the uncanny valley with zombies.

Graph of the uncanny valley. Photo: Creative Commons

My friend made the work of writing his draft easier. But in the process, he removed every ounce of anything that might have made it interesting enough to read. He made it human-like, to the point of being uncanny.

But he didn’t make it human. Because his human experience wasn’t there, which meant there wasn’t anything for my human experience to connect with. And that made it unsettling.

AI might be able to analyze whatever it analyzes and come up with a plot. It might be able to understand how characters are developed. But it can’t know how people feel. Or how they behave when they’re hurt or falling in love or preparing to destroy the world.

It can approximate it. But it’s very clearly a fascimile.

Will AI push journalists and freelance writers and bloggers out of jobs?

Perhaps. I really don’t know. It seems at least tangentially possible, I suppose. If it’s cheaper and easier, the people who control the money will probably give it a shot anyway.

But a better question is whether readers will really be happy over the long run reading work that has no human being behind it.

Can’t you tell the difference between an essay that’s made the writer vulnerable and offered up some part of themself, and a slapped-together SEO-filed nightmare of a blog post?

I don’t know what will happen in the future. But I am absolutely sure that fiction writers can take a breath, at least for now. Suggesting that AI won’t ever completely replace human fiction writers might feel like famous last words, but I firmly believe that AI is not on the verge of making us obsolete.

A computer can’t replicate human emotion. And fiction is its core, a conduit for human emotion.

Every time you hear ‘show don’t tell,’ what you’re really hearing is ‘make me feel something.’

A computer can’t make you feel something. And as long as that’s true, it will never replace human storytellers.

Let me show you.

I asked ChatGBT to write a paragraph that would make me cry. Here’s what it came up with.

In the fading light of a golden autumn evening, an elderly woman sits alone on a weathered bench, gazing out at a tranquil lake before her. The leaves on the tress are ablaze with hues of red and orange, reminiscent of the vibrant memories she holds dear. A soft breeze rustles her silver hair, and her trembling hand clutches a faded photograph that she tenderly traces with her fingertips. It captures a moment froze in time, a radient smile shared between her and a figure now absent from her life. As the sun dips below the horizon, casting a warm and melancholic glow across the landscape, tears well up in her eyes. The ache of loss and the weight of time’s passage converge in her heart, a bittersweet symphony that plays the song of a life well-lived, but not without its sorrows.

On the surface, it’s pretty astonishing that a computer could generate a paragraph like that in a few seconds. Really. Uncanny, like I said.

But, reading that was a very similar experience to reading my friend’s AI-generated fiction. The parts are all there. A sympathetic character, check. Sensory details, check. Words that mean ‘sad,’ check.

But it’s not quite right. And it certainly didn’t make me cry.

I live in a place where Mexican food is sadly lacking.

I’ve often thought that passes for tacos in northwestern Pennsylvania feels like someone saw a Taco Bell commercial once and thought — I could do that. But as not real Mexican food as Taco Bell is, at least it has the flavor profile in the ballpark. It’s at least reminiscent.

The Mexican food where I live at best looks right, but tastes all wrong. At worst you end up with a bowl of chili that’s actually refried beans with spaghetti sauce on top.

That’s what the AI paragraph that was supposed to make me cry is like.

The AI watched some Hallmark card commercials and tried to replicate it. At best, you get something that sort of resembles heart wrenching, but doesn’t really connect with anyone in any meaningful way. At worst you end up with something half-plagiarized and lacking.

Like this.

I asked ChatGBT to “plot a story about four teenage sisters during the US Civil War” and it gave me a mashup of Little Women and Gone With the Wind. I regenerated four times and got four variations of this.

The story begins on a peaceful Southern plantation, where the four sisters grow up amidst the whispers of war. Clara, the eldest, is strong-willed and protective. Emily possesses a keen intellect and an unquenchable curiosity. Sarah is empathetic and kind-hearted, while Amelia is full of youthful energy and spirit. Their idyllic world shatters when their father is called to fight for the Confederacy, leaving their mother and sisters to tend to the plantation.

Basically, Little Women set in Tara.

Now, let me show you a paragraph that made me cry for real.

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers. She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on. — Mark Zusak, The Book Thief

Do you see the difference?

There’s nothing grammatically wrong with the first one. It’s technically alright. But there’s nothing there. No real emotion. But Liesel kissing Rudy goodbye? That kiss will be with me the rest of my life.

Or how about this one.

Patrick Ness’s book A Monster Calls made me cry so hard, it scared my youngest daughter when she walked in on me. It was ugly, cathartic crying. My husband asked me after I’d read it if I wanted to watch the movie. I thought he was crazy. I wouldn’t put myself through that.

I teared up all over again, just looking for a quote to use for this post. I literally can’t read the following paragraph without crying. As I edited this post, I had to pass over it without reading it again.

“And if one day,” she said, really crying now, “you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn’t even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud.”

My mother died when I was young enough to really still be a kid. I didn’t feel like a child when I was twenty-four, but looking back from fifty-one? I wasn’t old enough to not have my mom. I had two babies, my marriage was falling apart — and I needed my mom.

My mother died of cancer, the same as Conor’s mom. Patrick Ness finished A Monster Calls because Siobhan Dowd, who conceived of the story and developed it with her publisher, died of cancer before she could actually write it.

The paragraph above taps into my own experience so hard and deep that I can’t not respond to it.

This is what ChatGBT came up with when I asked it to write a paragraph like the one above.

“And as time goes on,” he whispered, his voice choked with emotion, “if there comes a moment when you glance back, a moment when the weight of your silence and frustration weighs heavily on your heart, causing regrets to bloom, remember this, Emily. You must remember that it was alright. It was alright that you held those feelings, that you couldn’t find the words to share them with me. Please believe, Emily, please know deep within you, that I understood. I comprehended every unspoken thought and sentiment you harbored, without the need for utterance.”

Similar. But hollow. Shallow. And no tears. No response.

There is no way that AI can replicate the experience of reading A Monster Calls.

How could it? A machine that doesn’t have a mother can’t understand how it feels to hate yours for being sick at the same time that you desperately want to save her.

An AI will never be able to replicate Jo realizing that Laurie married Amy — and that it was always the right match. Or Scout standing up to the KKK, next to Atticus as he stoood guard over his client. Or Lucy’s heart breaking when Edmund lies to their brother and sister about Narnia. Or what Katniss felt when she fired that arrow into the observation pit.

Or any of the thousands and thousands of fictional moments powerful enough to be foundational to human life.

Scenes like those can only be written by people who know what it feels like to love or hate or be surprised or scared or to grieve. As long as that stays true, fiction writers don’t have to worry about becoming obsolete.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, Louie Baloo the dog, and Ollie Wilbur the cat. She’s on Instagram @ninjawritershop and is the author of Viral Nation, Rebel Nation, The Astonishing Maybe, and Center of Gravity. She is the original Ninja Writer.