Okay, so this thought kind of woke me up in the middle of the night, so I’m recording it because I don’t want to forget it. It’s about the nature of writing right now. You have people who call themselves writers and who use AI to write. And then there are people like me who say that if you’re not actually writing, then you’re not really a writer. If you’re using AI to write, are you truly a writer? That stance can come across as an insult, like I’m some snooty purist saying, “You’ll never be like us—real writers.” But I’m actually talking about something else.
We didn’t have video for a huge portion of human history. Then, when video came along, cinema happened, and a whole lot of professions mushroomed around it: cinematographer, choreographer, director, actor, and so on. Directors and actors existed before, but they performed in live plays on stage, with no recording involved. Cinema was something new. Pardon the expression (and forgive the barking dog in the background—it’s out of my control). Cinema was sort of like a play, except now the performance could be recorded and replayed. It was a new form of storytelling that hadn’t existed before, and its existence opened up new ways to tell stories.
The people who make movies aren’t writers, nor are they simply people engaged in theater. It’s a bit of both, and maybe neither. So, when I say that someone using AI to “write” a story isn’t a writer, I know it sounds purist. But I think that those people shouldn’t call themselves writers. The AI tools they’re using aren’t tools for writers. If you’re a writer, you’ll write. These tools are for a new kind of creator—one we don’t have a name for yet.
They’re people who, in a way, direct prose into existence. Until now, creating prose has been the job of a writer, so these individuals are mistakenly being classified as writers. But they’re not writers. They’re something else, and we need a term for them soon, or this debate will continue longer than it needs to.
That’s what I wanted to say. Thanks for listening to this midnight rant. Now I’ll go back to sleep.
This episode was recorded without a script, transcribed by Substack, and then the transcript was cleaned up using ChatGPT.
