My recent coverage in Business Insider got a secondary mention in this post about Sam Altman (paywalled, sorry – I use a blocker) who went on a podcast recently to reassure writers that AI will not replace them. Some choice quotes:

“There’s like a lot of bad AI writing plastered over the internet, and there’s like a lot of like bad student assignments that have probably been written by AI,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone’s serious.”

I will just say in response to that: I am totally serious.

“It’s definitely not like gonna replace coming up with the ideas anytime soon,” he said. “It’s an incredible tool for writers, but definitely not a writer.”

Well, I definitely use it to help come up with ideas. The problem is that these systems are becoming increasingly sanitized and neutered, making it oftentimes too hard to use them to really explore and cast about in the wild way that you sometimes need to do when you’re brainstorming.

While Altman thinks AI chatbots can work similarly to a “collaborator” that can undertake subtasks, he said that it would take “full super-intelligence,” or AI that reaches or exceeds human intelligence, before AI could threaten to replace human writing.

I’d like to think this is true, but after playing with the Google NotebookLM podcast generator for a few minutes based on documents I uploaded, it’s pretty clear that it will indeed and already is absolutely replacing certain kinds of writing – whether that’s podcasting, marketing copy, or other kinds of low-hanging fruit. Personally, I’m not really bent out of shape about it, because I’m a “centaur” (or a cyborg, or whatever).

“When I finish a great book, the first thing I do is like I want to know about the writer,” Altman said. “I want to know their life story. And I don’t think I’ll ever have that feeling to AI writing.”

The billionaire said that one of the main takeaways from an impactful book is the intrinsically human connection created between the reader and the author, one that he feels AI cannot replicate.

“You feel like you have this important shared human experience,” he said. “And that is some significant percentage of enjoyment of a great book to me, and I bet we keep doing that.”

I think we might be too narrowly defining still what constitutes an AI-assisted book. Seems to be here cast as something like a one-click option that shoots out a finished book. But my experience of writing, illustrating, producing, art directing, and editing over 120 short books written collaboratively between a human and many different AI systems is really different. I believe the books still deeply demonstrate that kind of human connection – and at times they do it by highlighting and holding a mirror up to the alienness of the AI-generated elements.

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