I don’t know how people can so brazenly dismiss AI art (for writing, music, images, and videos) when no one even fully knows the capacity of current models, let alone future ones. They say AI is not that good at X (be it writing fiction or making movies), when it is impossible for anyone to have fully explored the potential of AI at doing X. And that potential is growing by the day as each new LLM model is released.
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The anti-AI sentiment within the writing community is rabid. Many writers say that all AI writing is slop, and you should never use it. But I think that’s mostly denial and cope. LLMs are getting better by the day, and while I still mostly stand by this piece about the limits of ChatGPT at writing fiction, AI (Claude in particular) has gotten orders of magnitude better at writing fiction over the two and a half years since I wrote that—and it will only get better in the future. If you think AI cannot contribute to good writing, you’re not trying hard enough (or prompting well enough).
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Consider some of the classic great movies from the past, such as the monster movies of the 50s, the Spaghetti westerns of the 60s, the action thrillers of the 70s, and the horror slashers of the 80s. These movies were not great technically. Often the acting was mediocre, the ADR dialog was not synced, the lighting and color were off, and the special effects were cheap and cheesy. The monster was often a man in a suit—or a rubber shark that constantly malfunctioned. Yet the best King Kong is still the original from 1933, despite newer versions having much more realistic-looking giant apes. These movies are considered great despite their technical flaws because they were full of originality, creativity, and most of all vitality.
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“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a classic saying that I mostly disagree with. You can’t help but judge a book by its cover, and more often than not, the cover is accurately representative of the vibe of the book. I unabashedly judge books by their covers, and my initial thoughts are almost always correct. Covers that I am aesthetically drawn to inevitably have a story inside that I am aesthetically drawn to. It’s actually a good rule of thumb to judge a book by its cover. If you think the cover of a book looks appealing, you’ll usually like the contents of the book as well.
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T.Z. Barry 