On the current state of writing
Maybe your high school advisor was correct, maybe there is no future in writing.
I have been in love with an industry that has been dying since before I was born. Sometimes I watch an old episode of Sex and the City and find myself less in awe of the unrealistic fashion or lifestyle on display, and instead find myself dumbfounded by Carrie’s pay scale for writing at Vogue. This unrealistic pay? Four dollars a word. At this point in my essay, I would be netting $360 (before taxes that I don’t really understand how to pay). It’s not an astronomical amount of money, for sure, but it is the difference between buying bread at the store or trying (and failing) to make your own.
Sex and the City is a microcosm for many things right now, and isn’t it always? The show, like so many before it, has been nostalgia-baited into an ill-advised reboot, this time with all the Che Diaz you can legally handle. HBO’s (or just Max’s now?) And Just Like That finds the time to not only remind us of the earlier show’s messy 2000’s failings, but somehow perpetuate them in a newer even more ghoulish way. Is the industry so devoid of creative concepts that all we’ll have left at the end of the world will be another rehash of Mr. Big vs. Aidan?
Bafflingly, this show has been picked up for a third Hail Mary season, and not so bafflingly, I am still tuning in week after week to get my tiny morsel of nostalgia— my crumb of escapism. Show-runner Darren Star discusses on his podcast, The Writer’s Room, the thought processes behind each episode's writing, and the question I am somehow always left wondering is, how is this show not AI?
I mean, surely some of it is AI? Surely some of this is an illusion? Perhaps the facet that leaves me most saddened is that there is even the need for this conversation at all. The fact that we have to question the legitimacy of art makes me deeply (catatonically) depressed. In 2001, when you’d watch an episode of SATC (that’s insider lingo for the real fans) you knew real people worked on each episode, you knew Patricia Field was pulling looks, and that Sarah “Annie” Jessica Parker was allegedly causing friction between her co-stars. The good ‘ole days.
Being a writer now, as it likely always has been, is a constant demoralizing act of self-sabotage. I spent from May to September watching the WGA strike and heard time after time how little people truly respect the writers who create their favorite content. Even legacy brands and writing positions on esteemed TV shows, the jobs I, and many other writers, would consider to be “making it,” fail to pay a living wage. It’s a hard pill to swallow knowing that even if you reach your imaginary mountaintop, there may not be anything left at the top anymore.
It was especially deflating to see how, during this same timeframe, people flocked to generative-AI as a replacement for human writers. What’s the point of actually writing something with meaning and heart if:
A.) The higher-ups are enforcing tighter timeframes and turnaround with lessened budget
B.) The higher-ups are threatening to replace you and your coworkers with AI-bots
C.) Everyone thinks your writing could be, or frankly should be AI already.
or D.) All of the above.
I used to post on TikTok fairly regularly. I wouldn’t say I was a TikTok boy, but I did used to wear a pearl necklace and paint my nails a lot more than I do now. Part of the nature of this industry, one I reluctantly have made my peace with, is the act of “feeding the beast.” By which I mean, in order to have your content received and build an audience, you must shill out to the algorithm on a daily basis.
I don’t know if you have ever tried to write a poem every day, or if you have ever had to content-ify your life’s work, but it’s not necessarily something I would recommend. Seeing your art that way, something like a bite-sized sacrifice thrown into the ever-growing maw of the internet, leaves you feeling a little less than inspired.
For me, it also caused deep feelings of imposter syndrome. This obviously wasn’t real art. After all I was only making it to grow my audience, it was the equivalent of National Hotdog Day, a day created simply to post about. Hashtag first— art later.
I wanted my work to be something I was proud of. I wanted to release high-caliber artwork on a truly untenable schedule. To say I was burning myself out would be an understatement. I consider myself a fairly prolific writer, in quantity alone, and was certainly going through a phase of creative mania at the time. Even at that rate, I was not experiencing the growth I craved. I would look at other poets on the app, and wonder how are they doing it? How are they writing a poem every day, shooting a video, editing, and publishing? What do they know that I don’t?
Plagiarism.
One of these plagiarizing #GirlBosses is Aliza Grace, a writer described as “Gen-Z’s most prolific poet.” It is hard to tell how much of her work is willfully taken, and how much of it comes from generative-AI sources like ChatGPT, but the fact still stands, nearly every poem she has posted to her TikTok account is in some way plagiarized. Grace follows me, and honestly, I’m sure I could find at least one of her poems to be inspired by my own work. But the act of actually reading her work, which is rudimentary at best, feels too much like a slog to engage in. I also think that it might be an ego-killer to think that she’d steal my work, her taste is questionable at best.
One of the main reasons Grace got away with this blatant plagiarism for so long is due to the sheer glut of writing on her page. There are hundreds of videos, a wave of content too massive to comb through on any meaningful scale. This is the true horror of AI. With billions of inputs training each response, how can you even be sure what of your work is being stolen? How can one begin to track that down?
So where does this leave us? As writers what are we supposed to do? We are encouraged to share our work, which in turn trains algorithms to better imitate our voices. We look for an audience, and often that very audience steals our work and profits off of their plagiarism in ways that far supersede our own experiences. Every time we try to create, we are met by an industry and a culture that reminds us that our inherent ability to make art is so easily replicable, that what we do is little more than ones and zeros.
So forgive me if I am a little curt the next time I am reminded that there’s “no money left in writing as a profession.” As if it was me who had been bleeding it out, and undervaluing it for decades.
But hey, Patrick, at least your job is safe.