Ideas are Cheap
Thoughts about the work of writing and the sinister appeal of AI
“I’ve got a great idea for a book. How about I tell you the idea, you write the book, and we’ll split the profits 50/50?”
Almost every professional writer has heard some version of this, over the fence from a neighbor, at a reunion where you’ve identified yourself as A Writer Now, from a cousin or aunt or in-law. We hear it so much that it’s sort of an industry meme.
These people, I think, mean well. At least I choose to believe they’re in earnest and simply unaware of what a wildly disproportionate division of labor they’re proposing.
They are unused to creative work, and therefore unused to the idea that it is work. They’ve never actually done the work, so they don’t know.
Relatedly: Over on Worldbuilding for Masochists, we occasionally get emails from listeners who have been working on an idea and want to share it and get feedback, but are very concerned that someone might steal their great idea. They ask for advice: How do we protect our ideas?
This is often a very funny prospect to working authors, most of whom have far too many ideas already. Trying to finish one project often means beating all your other ideas away with a bat. We don’t need to go around stealing them. We are up to here with ideas.
Having ideas is never the hard part. The hard part is the work.
I currently have at least half a dozen ideas in some degree of being-toyed-with. So far, I haven’t been able to make any of them book-shaped, and while we can set aside the existential crisis of being an author struggling to make book-shaped words in a publish-or-perish industry for another day, the point is that those ideas, on their own? Are nothing. They’re candyfloss of the mind. I might enjoy turning them over in my head, but they’re not doing anything for anyone else unless I can make them work.
And making them work is the hard part. Writing is the hard part.
Those are just the ideas that have some glimmer of potential fruitful development. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many other ideas pop in and out of existence, like soap bubbles, in a given day.
There’s a great quote from Terry Pratchett (as there is for most things), in Wyrd Sisters, involving his Shakespeare-analog character Hwel.
“Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.
Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all.”
Everyone wants to believe that their ideas are great. Special. Worth something.
And I don’t want to say that’s totally untrue.
But….
Yeah, I kind’a do.
‘Cause here’s the thing — and it’s why I feel mean saying it, which makes me not want to say it — those of us who have lots of ideas? We know how worthless they are on their own.
For one thing, the chances of actually having a totally unique idea are vanishingly small. You’ve probably had the same idea, with slight variations, as many other people.
But, just as critically, is the uncomfortable yet unavoidable truth: Ideas only have meaning with work behind them.
If you get hit with sleeting inspiration all the damn time, it no longer feels special. Sometimes it feels like swatting away gnats. Sometimes it’s sifting through straw, looking for the strands that you think you can spin into gold, maybe. Sometimes it’s trying to get a squirrel to stop gnawing on your leg. A really shiny idea can be as much a nuisance as a boon, because you know how much work will be required to turn that idea into something anyone else should care about.
What Pratchett calls “a receptive mind” isn’t just the sleeting inspiration hitting a mind willing to entertain the idea. It means hitting a mind willing to do the work.
This is something that feels obvious in other industries. If you have a great idea for a new kitchen appliance or a special piece of furniture or — idk, just for instance — a self-driving car, that’s neat, but it means nothing if you can’t make the thing and make it work.
And yet when it comes to writing — and to other arts, as we’re clearly seeing in the realms of music and visual art — a lot of the population experiences some vital disconnect there. They don’t understand why the idea on its own isn’t good enough to earn them income and acclaim.
Which brings us to AI.
And the part where I really feel mean but am also pretty certain I’m right:
I think if you’re someone who doesn’t have a constant inundation of ideas, then when you do have one, it feels more precious to you than it does to those of us for whom ideas are just the unavoidable detritus of our lives. It makes you think, “yeah, this would be worth 50% of the proceeds from a book; yeah, just having this idea is 50% of the value of a product.”
And to at least some of those minds, AI is great. AI promises them fulfillment of their idea without having to do any of the work or having to figure out why their writer friends engage in awkward conversational contortions rather than just saying, “Sure! What a great deal!” when offered the unsolicited proposal for a 50/50 split.
AI lets them ignore the fact that writing is work.
AI tells them that yes, the idea alone has value. The idea alone is enough.
I’ve been working on this post for a while, but part of what spurred me to finish and post it was seeing, two days ago, a new “gpt-author” piece of absolute nonsense promising a whole novel! ready to publish! from just one prompt!
No.
Never mind that, in order to generate something based off of that idea, the AI generator is stealing other people’s work.
That doesn’t matter to people who don’t think the work has value, who believe that all the value lies in that glimmering, shimmering idea.
And so many of these are people who aren’t just ignorant of the work, the way a well-meaning but oblivious friend or relative might be; AI is popular with people who are actively disdainful of the work. Why should they have to work to get better at something?
These people are also missing the point of art entirely, but that’s probably an entirely separate post. The work is also the fun part. The work is where discovery happens. The process has value for the creator, and not only because it gets you to the end result. Humans create because we love to.
That’s how you can tell these folks don’t actually want to be writers, just to be known as writers, when they say things like “Now I can skip the boring part” — meaning, the actual writing.
This tweet is satire, but… y’know, only just barely. These are almost verbatim things that I’ve seen AI proponents say.
AI proponents don’t want to hear that it takes time and effort to turn an idea into something worthwhile. They just want the immediate gratification, and they actively mock the professionals telling them, uh, that’s really not how art works. If you want to be good at art, you have to practice it. A lot. With an eye towards improvement. Nope, they’re not interested in that. They want whatever prestige/respect/money/glory they imagine that the pros get, without having to be pros.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t dabble in the arts! Dabbling is fine! Dabbling is great! I actually think that, despite the negative connotations of the word, there’s nothing wrong with being a dilettante. Cultivating an interest in something does not obligate you to develop it as a professional-level skill or put professional-level hours of work in.
I am absolutely a baking dilettante. I enjoy it. I do it sometimes. I know a little bit about it. But I’m never going to put in the hours and labor and study and work to get really good at it. And that’s okay.
What you can’t do is be a dilettante and demand the (dubious) benefits that you’d get if you were a professional.
I’m an okay baker, but what I’m not going to do is act like I’ve got anything in common with a pro, or even with the really dedicated non-pros on Bake-Off. I’m certainly not going to show up to an event with a bunch of stuff I stole from one of those people and try to pass it off as my own — but that’s what AI art and writing creation does.
The drive for this increasing tendency of dilettantes aping professionalism comes, at least in part, from the incredibly toxic idea that if you’re doing something with your time that isn’t directly earning you money, it’s a waste of time and effort. Never mind that the arts are unlikely to make most people, even the pros, very much money anyway. Modern society demands that we monetize our hobbies, and I think that’s incredibly awful (as I ranted about, with regard to fanfiction, a few years ago).
Part of what’s so great about the arts is that — despite what the Tech Bros peddling AI want you to believe — there’s nothing stopping you from doing them on your own. No one’s going to tell you that you can’t. No one’s going to take the keyboard or paintbrush from your hands. People should have artistic hobbies! It’s healthy!
You can still get personal value from an activity you aren’t that good at. Bake the cake. Sing the song. Paint the picture. Play the sport. Write the fanfiction. You don’t have to be a pro for the time spent doing those things to be worthwhile!
But I think this fear of Wasting Time And Not Being Productive Enough is what sucks in some of the folk whose intentions may be benign but whose actions end up being harmful — your neighbor or relative or co-worker who offers you that great 50/50 deal.
AI’s sinister appeal lies in its promise to those who are unaccustomed to creative work. They promise users the credit, the money, the prestige — such as any of those things are — for having the idea but not doing the work. Then it’s not a waste of time, see! Then your idea has value, because it’s getting you something! Immediately!
But it’s all built on the theft of actual work.
(This all ties in, of course, with the movie studios and publishing houses who are eyeing AI to see how it can be useful to them — meaning, how it can increase shareholder profits by cutting out those pesky creators of the content they peddle. When you convince yourself that the labor does not have value, why bother paying the laborer?)
It’s going to collapse, eventually — precisely because ideas alone are not enough.
There are some suggestions that it’s already happening, as AI trains on itself in an ouroboros of dreck. Without human effort behind the generation, there’s nothing of value there. The people promoting the AI generators know this. They’ll straight-up tell you that if people could opt-out, their plagiarism machines wouldn’t work as well. (The jerk who runs Sudowrite openly admitted this, as well as admitting that it’s just too hard and expensive to compensate the people he’s stealing from).
The human effort is essential. Ideas alone are insufficient. Ideas alone have no inherent value. Ideas are cheap.
If you want to make an idea into something greater?
You have to do the work.