I Tried Using A.I. To Replicate My Creative Process. It Got Weird.
Can you turn a machine into a novelist?
The speculative-fiction writer Philip K. Dick used amphetamines and other stimulants to transform himself into a 24/7 writing machine. Powered by chemicals, he churned out 28 novels and more than 132 short stories (many of which used drugs as subject matter, including “A Scanner Darkly”). Nor was he alone: If pulp writers didn’t churn out as much copy as possible, they didn’t eat — and if that meant swallowing pills so you could write for two days straight, so be it.
In some ways, the writing business hasn’t changed much in the past century. For thousands of writers, the volume of copy you generate is proportional to how much you earn. Drugs are still a way to power through — I know more than one journalist or blogger who developed a nasty Adderall habit — but often it’s just a combination of caffeine and desperation.
I’m a journalist and editor who also writes pulp fiction on the side, so I’m as aware of the marketplace dynamics as anyone else in the writing business. Over the past year, I’ve been keeping an eye on the evolution of A.I. text generation, which is touted (by businesses) as a way of generating tons of content on the cheap, while derided (by writers) as a potential job killer.
