A Creative Writer’s Thoughts On AI

Lucius Matthiesen
6 min readJul 17, 2023

Is the arrival of the AI beast the end of art?

I’d put AI (artificial intelligence) back in the box in a heartbeat if I could. The problem is, AI is a genie that’s already left the bottle. So now what?

Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash

A not insubstantial part of me wishes that AI could be reversed, returned to Pandora’s box, never to be unleashed on the world. For all the good it may be able to do for humanity, it also encroaches on the territory what I consider sacred, namely human creativity.

But that’s not our reality. AI isn’t just coming — it’s here, it’s present, and it’s transformative. It’s changing the game of everything forever, much like the industrial revolution did, way back when.

AI is coming for most forms of creative expression, including my primary mode of expression, wordsmithing. I’m a member of several groups for writers on Facebook, and in many of them, as you can imagine, the conversation is billowing back and forth. It’s almost an all-out war between those who reject AI altogether and those who welcome our new ‘AI overlords’ with open arms.

I for one am far from ready to relinquish the rains of my creative chariot and let myself be reduced to a digital factory worker, directing and prompting the AI — a process that is guaranteed to strip all creativity and…

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