The industry of portraiture dominated all painting. Photography destroyed the value proposition of portraiture by mostly invalidating talent and producing photographs in less time and more cheaply than an artist and the photograph preserved the fundamental elements that were actually desired.
A substantial fraction of artists had to shift their styles or find new work and it is one of the major causes of the shift towards styles like impressionism or surrealism.
While you're right that using AI to write your stories isn't writing - just as portrait photography isn't painting - it is still storytelling. Those who think of elaborate ways to dismiss that this still leaves the human in charge of directing, edits, rewriting, and ultimately inspiration the story invariably end up relitigating the old arguments of portrait artists painters and portrait photographers. The focus of both overlap, but they're also different. The photographer has additional concerns that the painter does not have and the same is true in reverse. This applies to literature and especially storytelling whether written by a human using a word processor, or by the long iterative process of outlining, prompting, editing, modifying, and pasting together a story.
In the end I'm certain that people will accept "AI-Assisted Writing Storytelling" and other similar artistic endeavors because they still require human input and more importantly preserve the fundamental elements that people actually desire. Another user mentioned they'd consider this something akin to making collages and that's a fair comparison, but just look up a collage on Wikipedia and it will say: Collage is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts.
Make a new word for creating stories out of artificially generated user directed word collections into well organized and edited collages that can be wholly unique and frequently indistinguishable from human writing if you want - you're right that it isn't the same art as writing but if you said it wasn't storytelling I'd have to disagree and I think history will vindicate me like it always does in these situations when artists are threatened by a new form of art assisted by technology that undercuts their value proposition. Maybe this will lead too a shift towards poetry with exotic and original structural forms and constraints (like House of Leaves) or maybe to stories that go beyond what LLM can imitate.
Last year I remember seeing a Japanese novelist win an award with the help of an LLM.[1]
Art forms frequently evolve, but there are several concerns with the use of LLMs for creative writing. For one, there's the issue of copyright infringement that famous writers are taking up arms against:
Even if someone legally acquired non-copyrighted text to train an LLM on, there’s also the issue of talent.
If someone told me they produced a 300-page novel by hand—I would be impressed.
If someone else told me they produced a 300-page novel with the aid of an LLM (that wrote the vast majority of the book) and the human merely organized the AI-generated content—I would consider the real author to be the LLM and the human would merely be an editor (or, at best, an artist creating a collage).
The more someone relies on LLMs to write a novel, the less impressive their accomplishment is.
The debate on the overuse of technology in writing has been going on long before LLMs took the stage. In the 1980s writers were debating the word processor as a legitimate writing tool:
I respect the famous authors who have gone to great lengths to produce their books. With the advent of LLMs, people will be deprived of the thinking process. They'll miss the opportunity to struggle before a blank piece of paper while nervously chewing on a Ticonderoga #2 pencil, and they'll miss the opportunity to sit behind a keyboard and mutter swear words at the blinking cursor that seems to be taunting them and asking what’s next?
With the ubiquity of LLMs, we'll never actually know if an author is using AI to think for them.[2] Practically anyone can be an author now. And when everyone's an author, no one will be.
I asked a friend if he thinks it's silly that I only use my biological brain to write. He said, "You're still allowed to do math without a calculator. But why would you?" Paul Graham has a good rebuttal to that:
I wonder if we'll look back on the people (like me) who solely use their biological brains to produce writing and view them as luddites compared to everyone else using LLMs. Am I basically a grumpy old scribe complaining about the newfangled Gutenberg Press? Or will my steadfast refusal to let go of a fading art form be seen as the death throes of a generation that's more than happy to slide into the warm comfort of brain rot.
She didn't simply tell ChatGPT "write me an entire story about XYZ", but instead used the LLM to generate text for an AI assistant within the story which characters interacted with.
People are constantly searching for competitive advantages. Unlike in the world of sports, there are few regulations in the writing world. Authors can claim their work is strictly biologically-produced for status purposes, but how can we possibly verify that? LLMs will become the PEDs of writers.