It’s everywhere…running in the background, collecting, aggregating, sorting, and evaluating. And we’ve already been co-existing with it for longer than you might think. We invite Alexa into our kitchens to listen to our conversations, Siri onto our phones to answer our questions, and Google to be our gateway to the internet where every keystroke and mouse click is observed and analyzed. We’re talking about Artificial Intelligence, of course, and if you have a computer or smartphone, you can’t escape it. You can’t opt-out. It’s as much a part of the architecture of the digital world as the soil beneath our feet is the biological world.

For years, these programs were trained in secret (without our knowledge or permission) on the writings, research, music, and art generated by millions and millions of people. LLMs have assimilated the training and knowledge of a million human lifetimes of education, training, experience, and creativity. And when asked to generate content, they do so at superhuman speed. Digital content creators such as journalists, writers, coders, and graphic artists are already being laid off and replaced by AI. The same is true for paralegals, research assistants, analysts, and translators. As novelists, whose livelihood is content generation, we are acutely sensitive to the threat Artificial Intelligence poses to our profession. Curious about what the LLMs themselves would think about the matter, we decided to ask them.