People say things such as "AI art is garbage" and "It's plagiarism," but also "AI art is going to destroy creativity itself." These reactions are contradictory, but nobody seems to notice. AI is the bogeyman in the shadows: The obscurity, more than anything the monster has actually perpetrated, is the source of loathing and despair. Consider the ongoing feud between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The writers are on strike, arguing, among other things, that studios should not be able to use AI tools to replace their labor.

When the company OpenAI launched its new artificial intelligence program, ChatGPT, in late 2022, educators began to worry. ChatGPT could generate text that seemed like a human wrote it. How could teachers detect whether students were using language generated by an AI chatbot to cheat on a writing assignment? As a linguist who studies the effects of technology on how people read, write and think, I believe there are other, equally pressing concerns besides cheating. These include whether AI, more generally, threatens student writing skills, the value of writing as a process, and the importance of seeing writing as a vehicle for thinking.

As a writer collective, we've had AI on the brain--from my last piece on AI companion bots to Evan's excellent essay on the AI value chain to Nathan's exploration of the infinite AI article. Every has also been building Lex, a word processor with AI baked in. I started working on this piece before we launched Lex, but testing out this tool (among others) has shaped my perspective on the role of AI writing assistants for creatives. Try it for yourself: watch the demo and sign-up to join the waitlist (Every's paid subscribers have priority access, so subscribe to skip the line). In 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin created an experimental short sci-fi film written entirely by a neural network.

You're about to confront a pernicious new challenge that is spreading, kudzu-like, into your student writing assignments: papers augmented with artificial intelligence. The first online article generator debuted in 2005. Now, A.I.-generated text can now be found in novels, fake news articles and real news articles, marketing campaigns, and dozens of other written products. The tech is either free or cheap to use, which places it in the hands of anyone. Using an A.I. program is not "plagiarism" in the traditional sense--there's no previous work for the student to copy, and thus no original for teachers' plagiarism detectors to catch.

What is GPT-3 and how can writers use it responsibly as part of their creative process? How can we approach AI tools with curiosity, rather than fear? In the intro, I mention the discussion about whether Google's language model, LaMDA, could be sentient [The Verge]; and the Alliance of Independent Authors Ethical Usage of AI tools. If you'd like to know more about using AI for writing, images, marketing, voice, translation, and more, check out my course, The AI-Assisted Author. Andrew Mayne is the multi-award-nominated and internationally best-selling author of thrillers. He invented an underwater stealth suit for shark diving, and he works with OpenAI as a science communicator. He also has books for authors, including, 'How to Write a Novella in 24 hours,' and a co-hosts the podcast'Weird Things.' You can find Andrew at www.AndrewMayne.com You can find GPT-3 on OpenAI.com. There are many tools built on top of GPT-3. I use and recommend Sudowrite for fiction, in particular. Joanna: Andrew Mayne is the multi-award-nominated and internationally best-selling author of thrillers. He invented an underwater stealth suit for shark diving, and he works with OpenAI as a science communicator. He also has books for authors, including, 'How to Write a Novella in 24 hours,' and a co-hosts the podcast'Weird Things.' Andrew: Hey, thank you for having me. Joanna: Oh, you do so many things. But we are actually going to talk about AI today. Andrew: Well, ever since I was a little boy, I was really interested in science, and entertainment, and everything in between. And I loved robots when I was a kid. And I'd build robots from science fairs and stuff, and I would use coffee cans, and little motors and things I pulled from toys to do that.

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon's Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks. Lepp became an author six years ago, after deciding she could no longer stomach having to spout "corporate doublespeak" to employees as companies downsized. She had spent the prior two decades working in management at a series of web hosting companies, where she developed disciplined project management skills that have translated surprisingly well to writing fiction for Amazon's Kindle platform. Like many independent authors, she found in Amazon's self-service publishing arm, Kindle Direct Publishing, an unexpected avenue into a literary career she had once dreamed of and abandoned.

In 1896, the Lumiere brothers released a 50-second-long film, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and a myth was born. The audiences, it was reported, were so entranced by the new illusion that they jumped out of the way as the flickering image steamed towards them. The urban legend of film-induced mass panic, established well before 1900, illustrated a valid contention if the story was, in fact, untrue: The technology had produced a new emotional reaction. That reaction was hugely powerful but inchoate and inarticulate. Nobody knew what it was doing or where it would go. Nobody had any idea that it would turn into what we call film. Today, the world is in a similar state of bountiful confusion over the creative use of artificial intelligence. Already the power of the new technology is evident to everyone who has managed to use it.

For decades we've been warned that artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs. Sci-fi books and movies going all the way back to Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano portray a world where workers have been replaced by machines (or in some instances, just one machine). More recently, these ideas have moved from the annals of novels into the predictive economic papers of governments and consulting firms. In 2016, the Obama administration authored a report warning that the robots were coming, and that millions of Americans could soon be out of a job. In 2021, McKinsey predicted that algorithms and androids would vaporize 45 million jobs by 2030.

"The baseball legend Yogi Berra once had a manager tell him to think more when he was up at bat. Berra responded, 'How can a guy hit and think at the same time?' It was a fair question. After all, when a pitcher throws a fastball, the batter has about 400 milliseconds to see the pitch, judge its direction, and swing the bat. "The human eye takes about 80 milliseconds to react to a stimulus.

Indicators that writers will need to scramble lest they find themselves replaced by a robot in coming months or years were out in full force in Q2. Those included a warning that some big news outlets are simply dying to replace writers with robots. Says Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University: "Let me introduce you to the two most bottom line-obsessed newspaper publishers in the United States: Alden Global Capital and Gannett. "If they could, they'd unleash the algorithms to cover everything up-to-and-including city council meetings, mayoral speeches and development proposals. "And if they could figure-out how to program the robots to write human-interest stories and investigative reports, well, they'd do that too."