[Friday Features] AI Text May Not Replace Shakespeare, But It Will Replace You
What PQ Rubin thinks about the future of writing
Hi! This is a new segment called Friday Features. Every Friday, I plan on exposing you to various perspectives about writing systems and AI. This will help you develop a more holistic outlook on writing faster, better, and more human!
Plus, you gain a lot of new tips and tricks from active writers in the Substack community.
This week’s guest is
from Prompting Culture. Let’s dive right in!
We've reached a peculiar moment in writing history where artificial intelligence threatens to rewrite the rules of human creativity.
We often talk about how good generative AI has become, and whether it will ever beat humans at writing. In fact, everyone seems to have an opinion on this. Mine is that AI has not been around for long enough to have such a definite opinion on, and that AI has already beaten human writers.
Asking the right questions
You see, there's another important thing to consider when discussing if AI can beat human writers: Just how good are human writers? Humans like to think they are masters of the written word. They're dead wrong. Sure, some literary works are amazing. But you didn't write those, did you?
Ask the average person to write a story and they will come up with the same old tropes every time: fairy tales with royalty and dragons, sci-fi with spaceships and lasers, mysteries with crime-solving dogs. Maybe a few others, but the list is not all that long. When you think about it, the average human is not all that creative.
A new era of writing
Human authors navigate language organically, weaving words through their inner narrative and occasionally consulting an outside source, like a thesaurus.
Large Language Models, by contrast, operate with computational precision that feels almost supernatural, synthesizing information at speeds that would make most writers dizzy. Where we labor over paragraphs, LLMs generate entire essays in seconds, drawing from massive datasets. They're extraordinarily sophisticated pattern-matching machines: impressive, but not sentient. The difference isn't just speed, but the scale of information processing.
The secret to good AI text
Maybe you're an AI skeptic, and you believe the only result of generative AI can be 'AI slop'. In the case of text, that translates to: formulaic walls of text, built from eerily even paragraphs full of em-dashes and robotic turns of phrase, littered with clichés like: "complex and multifaceted", "delve into", and "reshaping".
Well, let me reshape your idea of AI text then. What you know is only the default output. You can simply ask for a different style and the AI will comply. You see, it's all about prompting technique. Give an AI the right prompt, and it can return text that's engaging, informative, and tailored to the audience. Things that many human writers struggle with, by the way.
If you're having trouble producing good text with AI, it's not some inherent AI limitation you're up against. It's just that you might be as bad at writing prompts as you are at writing in general.
But don't worry, AI is here to help! Just ask your friend ChatGPT (or Claude, NotebookLM, Llama, it doesn't matter) to reflect on your prompting habits. While you're at it, ask about best practices for effective AI prompting regarding style transfer. It gets a bit 'meta', but AI does know AI best.
Final thoughts
The truth is, AI is not going to replace the very best human authors. But it will replace many of us. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. We may even prefer the collaborative process (and its high-quality results) over old-fashioned writing. Which was kind of boring anyway.
It's often said that AI will do the boring tasks for us, allowing us to focus on the important things: creativity, innovation, and having fun. We can make this happen. So let's stop worrying about whether AI is going to replace us, and start thinking about how we can use it to produce something truly remarkable.
P.Q. Rubin
This article first appeared as a guest post on Write10x.
Thanks, James Presbitero, for introducing me to your amazing audience!
Check out Prompting Culture on Substack, where I cover all things AI and beyond.
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Maybe my Luddite side is coming out. The reality is that there’s a limited number of stories and good authors just learn how to tell them better and make them their own. While an AI system can crank out reams of words your own tests showed the creative stories had elements of good writing but didn’t pull in the reader.
Will AI writing be used for commercial purposes like writing manuals, probably yes. If the goal is to crank out good enough writing for a commercial purpose, then AI will likely win the day. When it comes time for engaging original writing, like any other art form, there’s value to the human creator. As a writer I get joy from the act of writing and the slow polishing of my stories, especially when they connect with readers. That alone makes it worth my time and efforts.
I find your forays into AI fascinating and cheer you on, yet at the same time I’m happy to be a spectator and have zero interest in pursuing AI writing myself. Perhaps one day I’ll change my mind. For now I’ll enjoy being a happy Luddite.
"you might be as bad at writing prompts as you are at writing in general." 😂
On a different note, I have a chat dedicated to writing stories of different futures of my life. I started the chat as a way to try to stop catastrophizing when under a lot of stress. Its great for showing me possibilites that would never otherwise crossed my consciousness. And often quite fun.
At some point I'll share a Substack post with more information plus an example.