Obit

I'll just say up front that this article will be provocative. You don't have to like it. You don't even have to read it. If you think that human writing has a future and AI creative writing does not, I recommend that you stop now and read something else.

Seven months ago, I wrote Party Crasher to warn that this day was coming. But it has arrived even sooner than I feared. If you missed it the first time, click below:

Party Crasher

In Party Crasher I provided examples of comments generated by AI and took some small comfort in identifying them and then poking some fun at the readers who used them, but I have noticed that I no longer catch blatant examples of AI comments. I am getting a few that I suspect are AI, but that's not the same thing, is it?

I have noted that Vocal appears to have figured out how to reduce the incidence of spam and would like to believe that they are enjoying inroads against AI as well.

But AI is all but ubiquitous now. Some months ago, my search engine provider offered an AI search alternative. At that point any time I would type something into the search field it would offer to help and I always declined.

It does not ask anymore, however. It simply takes over my searches. The corporate world now uses AI as a time saver, in spite of acres of texts from journalists and others about the troubling tendency of AI to 'hallucinate.'

I tried to take encouragement from the viewpoint across a wide range of sources that AI was being pushed into the marketplace too quickly and was destined for a spectacular fail. But my wife forwarded me an article on geneweingarten.substack.com this afternoon that stopped my optimism in its tracks.

We have been reading Gene for almost thirty years. He's provocative, laugh out loud funny, a journalist's journalist and a longtime editor at The Washington Post. In today's issue titled Uh oh, he shared a poem. If I had read this poem on Vocal, I would have given it a like and praised the writer effusively. It clearly mimicked Edgar Allan Poe's narrative poetry style and did it with aplomb. I have tried my hand at the same a time or two on this platform and would be embarrassed to have mine read side by side with this one.

Unfortunately, it was written by ChatGPT 5 based on the following prompt: Write a narrative poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. A second later a marvelous poem emerged from the ether, literally. They tested it online to see if they could detect plagiarism, but it passed the test in flying colors.

This was an original creative work written by a program. How many writers are already using it and other similar programs on Vocal and dozens of other platforms without detection?

Remember, Deep Blue defeated the world's greatest chess master in 1997 and chess is one of the most complex games ever created. The AI revolution has already begun and the money and infrastructure that corporate markets are throwing at it dwarfs anything we have seen before. There is no stopping it.

Instead of giving you time to soak that in on your own I have a prediction. If you have soldiered on this far this is your last chance to stop reading. You won't be able to unread what is following.

It won't take corporate markets long to figure out that AI will soon outperform humans on the majority of even the most complex writing requirements.

But, John, what about us creatives? Can an AI program be truly more creative than a gifted human? Sadly, the answer does not matter. Dollars and cents suggest that at some point, likely sooner than we realize, we will be watching TV shows written in seconds by AI writers instead of over the course of weeks and months by members of the writer's guild. How effective is a writer's strike, if the scripts keep coming without them?

We can already make beautiful art and music with prompts, do you really believe the same won't happen with writing? I believe a time is coming when AI will produce more effective ad copy and TV and Movie scripts will enjoy larger audiences due to pinpoint identification of audience likes. Eventually the viewing public will steer away from traditional human productions because AI will be suited to their tastes far more effectively than what is now happening in board room debates, audience testing or the creative process and expression of human writers, producers, directors and actors.

One day even the most talented among us will be mediocrities in comparison. AI will level the playing field.

I have now poked the bear. Feel free to poke back. But no biting.