Adrian Tchaikovsky is a serial award winner in traditional publishing science fiction circles, and in the middle of an anti-AI rant on BlueSky, he brought up the interesting point that ideas are not the hard part for most writers.
A lot of amateur writers and readers perpetuate the myth that ideas are simply challenging to come up with for storytelling, which may be the case for most people, and why they aren’t storytellers. But for the professional writer, typically, one has more ideas than can reasonably be put to paper. A recent Vox article posited that AI is building new ideas, but it fundamentally misses the entire point of AI, which is to bring ideas to execution more easily.
Sci-fi writer Adrian Tchaikovsky has over 100 titles out, and he’s familiar with the idea of ideas.
He posted a rant to BlueSky about the topic:
“The cliche that ‘having an idea’ is the hard part of writing is persistent and pernicious. Realising the idea is the craft of it. That FAQ of where do you get your ideas from’ that authors often dread focuses on this misunderstanding. Ideas are easy.
Ideas spring from ideas. Ideas create a more complex ecosystem that prompts the evolution of more ideas. We’re not going to run out of ideas but generative AI is a tool for people who don’t want to be involved in the step between idea and art. People whose own ideas will never evolve or become more complex because they don’t actually want to interact with or examine them.”
While his concept that somehow the work in between equals the art value is a fundamentally Marxist position of the “labor theory of value,” he’s correct that ideas are not the most difficult part for most professional authors.
In fact, what makes AI interesting is the ideas that were once abandoned by authors for simply not having enough time in the day to implement them, now become workable for the author in question. Abandoned novels can easily get completed, and soon we will be having those ideas turned into animation, movies, and games, as the process gets more consistent.
For those with the ideas, there will be an output multiplier like never seen before, but indeed it will not help those without the ideas, the uncreative, because they will still be stuck trying to get to step one. And AI is not particularly good at generating those ideas, which is where Tchaikovsky has it somewhat right in his analysis.
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Craft is indeed lacking, but good ideas are also lacking (or smothered under an oppressive blanket of wokeness and/or risk aversion).