“AI will distort history.”
This was my immediate thought after seeing a video of a scene I recognised well. The characters had been replaced with AI, and if it weren’t for my now-fading recognition of what is real and what is not, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that what I had just seen was false.
It didn’t help to realise how much artificially generated content I had been consuming, and how relaxed my tolerance for it had become. And, without bias, I admit that some of it is good—really good. Yet the realisation that some form of human suffering is absent from the process leaves me dissatisfied for some reason.
Certainly, the ethics surrounding the use of AI, particularly in writing, remain a constant debate and carry real consequences. Recently, two African authors were accused of using generative AI in their yet-to-be-published books. The accusations questioned their ingenuity and reportedly led to them losing their publication deals.
While these events have drawn reactions from writers and creators alike, they subtly highlight another concern regarding the acceptance of African authors in the diaspora. Almost as if to ask: How could non-native English speakers write eloquently?
Some tools and studies claim to be able to spot AI signatures, particularly in writing, and the arguments sound sensible enough. Check for em dashes. Look at sentence structures, punctuation choices, and, even more ridiculously, word choices.
According to an article by The Economist on How to Spot AI Writing, the article highlights George Orwell’s assertion about writers who dress up simple sentences to sound clever. Still, I wonder: what is wrong with wanting to sound clever?
The words exist.
How are we supposed to know new words and learn new expressions if we no longer have people who, in fact, sound clever?
A frustrating position in all this disputation, especially as a Nigerian who can speak English more fluently than their native language, is that through years of formal education, I have never been at a loss for colourful expressions in English.
From our playful mix of words to our peculiar styles of speech—and my personal favourite, theatrical insults.
In secondary school, you would have to fight for the honour of your family name if someone called you a stupendous ignoramus or bombastic element.
As a child living with my parents, my dad would complain about me moving aimlessly around the parlour and would often use pleonasms:
“Stop parabulating around this house.”
For some of these expressions, I didn’t know their precise meaning at the time. But I understood their implications. And this largely influenced how I speak and, more importantly, how I choose to write.
However, an AI fanatic—or purist—could take a look at any of my pieces and claim that they were AI-written. With tools that support their claim, only God can be my judge of the truth.
Interestingly, there is still no way to know with absolute certainty the true origin of a written text. These detection methods remain imperfect, and AI detectors are prone to false positives, as The Economist also notes.
An author can be accused of using the technology and simply deny it. The detector may say otherwise. And then what?
John Grisham, author of The Firm, a novel later adapted into a feature film starring Tom Cruise, was asked on CBS Mornings about his almost-completed book and whether it would involve artificial intelligence.
His response was simple:
“I don’t understand it… I don’t trust it; I don’t use it. I wrote 50 books before I heard about AI, so I don’t need it.”
Yet I wonder if his editor will use it. Or someone else within the production line of the book. And if they do, does that somehow change the merit of the finished book?
There is a lot more nuance to the use of AI than the traditionalist-versus-progressive argument suggests.
There is the originality of the idea. There is the flair in its delivery. There is the writer’s ability to observe something ordinary and make it interesting. There is voice, rhythm, experience! The strange combination of things a person has seen, read, heard, and suffered that eventually becomes a sentence.
These are the elements that make a writer brilliant—or basic.
Yet no amount of clamour will reduce or stop the use of artificial intelligence in creative work. The conversation, therefore, will have to move from its current position.
The criteria for determining merit will have to evolve.
Especially as AI becomes increasingly capable of masking its own output, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between human and machine-generated work.
Those criteria will have to go beyond instinct and technological verdicts.
I cannot precisely commit to what they will be, but I would adumbrate that they will border on reputation—however that reputation is manufactured.
Few would look at a new book by Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Adichie or Ben Okri and immediately assume it was written by AI. And even if they did, the accusation would probably carry little weight with an audience already familiar with the quality of their previous work.
So yes, new writers and authors will have to create their own reputations somehow.
For now, that increasingly seems to hinge on social media: showing your face, sharing your thoughts, creating visual content around the subjects you care about, and allowing people to become familiar with the mind behind the work.
But it would be a grievous blunder to believe that reputation is bulletproof against poor work.
It would be almost insulting to assume that an audience cannot eventually sense the absence of style, voice, or immersiveness—the things that are difficult to manufacture because they come from somewhere deeper than technical competence.
For the individual who worries about being swallowed by the vortex of AI-written content, the largely recommended antidote is to read more physical books.
I fear that will not suffice.
It is sufficient for now.
But perhaps that is the real problem.
We are still trying to solve tomorrow’s problem with yesterday’s methods.
Next up, we will discuss Eurocentrism and its constant presence in the work of brilliant African artists—and what the alternative should be, if at all one exists.
Until next time,
Be Unruly and Stay Fly.
The powerful are always hellbent on rewriting history. Personally, on the subject of AI writing, I’ve found it increasingly difficult over the last couple of years to read without analyzing whether a piece of text is AI-generated. It isn’t out of malice. I do it with my own work and other people’s work too. I cannot read new media, especially fiction or observational writing, without some part of my brain scanning for the fingerprints of AI. It is unsettling, joyless and dystopian.