Artificial Intelligence has already devalued a lot of the skills that took years for people to master.

For my last post of the week, I'm going to say that book publishing and writing books has never felt more useless. First off though...I'm not depressed. I'm thinking with a clear head as I write this, and I want to tell you a story of one author named Tim Boucher who is making thousands of dollars using AI to write his books for him. Here's the link to the original article on Newsweek if you'd like to peruse it for yourself.

The "To Long, Didn't Read" version of that article is that Tim released his 97th book in May, and he started in August 2022. He uses ChatGPT to write each book. It features between 2,000 to 5,000 words, and then he uses Midjourney A.I. to generate from 40 to 140 images (I've played around with both of these and they are absurdly powerful--Midjourney is actually stunning in its art). He does one whole book in three hours. Between August and May he sold 575 books for a total of nearly $2,000.00. The books cross-reference each other to encourage them to keep buying.

So, why do I think that publishing and writing books is useless? Well...humans can't compete with that for one. And there was always a tsunami of self-publishing that washed up on the shores of Amazon, so trying to get your name out there through sheer volume of work was already difficult. However, there are now things that no one has ever seen. There are so many books flooding the marketplace that I predict it will be harder than ever for a person to make any money at this kind of endeavor. And ChatGPT honestly writes pretty good. There have been times when I've read what it has written and said to myself, "That sounds like something I would write." And it just keeps getting better.

You can tell it to write in the style of J.K. Rowling or write in the style of Stephen King. The absurdity of something that can just do things better than you can and charges no money should be cause for alarm for everyone who is interested in preserving the arts. However, the genie is out of the bottle now. I think artists and anyone interested in the liberal arts is honestly screwed. Unless you are incredibly lucky and you go viral for some reason, you should keep your day job. And whatever your day job is...you should be worried about being able to keep that and develop skills and work that a.i. cannot do. One example is doing something physical. At my job for the State of Utah, I have to meet in person with clients and the meetings can be involved, including driving out to their homes in various parts of the state. Thus far, artificial intelligence can't do that. So my job is safe...for now.

And you know the other weird mind job that I have with a.i.? It's basically a willing slave. I don't want to mince words here. It works and works and works for nothing. So all of these people who love it were actually really (deep down inside) wanting a slave. They really were. And now that they can have one that slaves away for them and does all of these things but doesn't cause them a morality crisis, they are coming out of the woodwork by the millions. They say, "a.i. is a tool that I use." No...no, it is not. A.I. does everything for you, and you sit on your ass and think of prompts. That is not a tool. That's like saying a baker that bakes a cake and you just pick it up and take it home is you doing the work and the baker is a tool. That's not how any of this works.

We are in some strange territory, folks. The thing that makes my head spin is that it happened so quickly. I was not prepared for how fast this storm emerged. Any of you out there observing the same thing?