Replays are a type of literature that cannot be replicated by AI. Does this mean that they are a superior form of literature? They are not. At least not by the current standard of literature, which values literature as mainly some product to be consumed by a passive audience and to be dissected by equally uncreative critics, rather than experienced by its creators.
Artificial intelligence has yet to produce much readable long-form fiction. However, in the long term improvements will most likely compound to produce better results.
This means writers should adapt their craft to fit niches which cannot be easily filled by AI — rather than panic or give up or grow despondent.
Replays are one such niche into which authors could specialise.
But what is a replay? In simple terms, it is a script of a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) session.
The purpose of replays is to, usually, encourage players to pick up the game system used in the replay by giving readers a practical example of the rules in action.
Thus, the reader is encouraged to promote the system to his peers, if not reach and network with others to make another replay possible. Thus, the reader is no longer just a consumer but also a creator, an active participant.
It is this ACTIVE PARTICIPATION in the process of creation which Artificial Intelligence cannot replicate and more importantly cannot provide to the reader who’s been left slack-jawed mindlessly feeding on slop without the understanding of the material that can only come through creating it. Such learned helpless is bound to be unsatisfying.
In other words, even if AI reaches the point where it can spit out a whole flawless series of novels, that it would have taken years to write, with a single prompt, it would not be able to replicate the feeling of creating something yourself.
The question then is, how can you convey this feeling of creation to the modern audiences who are used to consuming more than they produce? I believe that replays are the answer because they contain in themselves, as well as the elements that go to make a story, “the making of” the recipe for how the story was written.
This integration of the creative process into its product/output, is in my opinion the key, and a better “call to action” than any of the lamentations of artists who expect their audiences to sympathise with their plight and reject AI out of compassion for the creators of the art which they like or even just out of principle.
Unfortunately, the relationship between artists and audiences today is nothing more than the relationship between the means of production and consumers. This is what lies behind all para-social relationships: Profit and Loss. The rest is delusions.
The solution then is to simply destroy the distinction between novelists and readers. However, this cannot be achieved semantics and rhetorical tricks such as claiming that there is no distinction between art and life or between creating art and living life.
In a sense we are fortunate that we live in a time when Large Language Models might irrevocably blast into pieces some of these borderline mystical beliefs about the creative process, by showing that a machine without the spark of imagination can also create art. These lies did nothing but obscure the consumerist, non-interactive, transactional relationship between art and life. Even literary analysis is another product for passive consumption.
What I hope that AI will force artists to consider, is to create more participatory art without compromising too much on the quality of the art. It’s a difficult balance to strike because once a medium has lost its rough edges it ceases to be participatory since the standard has been raised to a point where normal people who are not professional artists cannot meaningfully participate; and so it becomes easier to just consume other people’s superior art for most people. Since they will not be able to produce such great art it becomes preferable to sit on the side-lines and sing the praises of or utter the curses at some other art one had no hand in creating.
To reiterate my point one final time; if AI is able to create high quality long-form writing then those professional writers might have to come down from their lofty mountains and reach out to the masses directly in a way that AI cannot. If excellence alone is not going to differentiate human art from artificial art then human art and writing might have to pivot more in-person events such as replays to remain relevant.
