Writing Is Knowledge, Which Means Writing Greats Needn’t Fear AI

“If we don’t reinvent ourselves, and we don’t open the canvas for the things we can do,” we “will be commoditized out of business.” Those are the words of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. What’s notable about what he has said is that it really isn’t notable.

Ask any company founder and/or CEO what it takes to remain relevant in business, and they’ll tell you much the same as Huang has. As Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank once put it, “No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.”

Which is a reminder that once you innovate, whether it’s in technology, retail or sports, your innovation is soon enough public knowledge and capable of being copied. They don’t refer to the NFL as the “copycat” League for nothing. Everyone’s looking at what everyone else is doing.

All of the above is important to think about in consideration of bestselling author David Baldacci’s recent congressional testimony about artificial intelligence, or AI. Baldacci warned about the capacity for AI to enable rampant theft of the work done by writers, including prominent ones like him.

The first response to testimony like Baldacci’s is to ask what he’s bothered about. 99.99999% of writers would give anything to have the style and skill that rates copying, let alone the sales that would cause someone to go on ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, or myriad other AI sites to reproduce opinion pieces, scripts, and in Baldacci’s case books that resemble his bestsellers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that.

It’s also seemingly forgotten by Baldacci that what bothers him has always been the norm in business. See Huang at the opening of this opinion piece, or Blank.

It cannot be said enough that once any product or service is released to the buying public, it’s immediately available for reproduction. Most in business like this because as opposed to markets being zero sum, the happier truth is that there’s no limit to their size.

Think Starbucks in China. In some ways Starbucks created a high-end coffee market for the increasingly acquisitive population, but as opposed to capturing it all, the thousands and thousands of Starbucks stores on the mainland created the opportunity for others to profitably enter the market. See Luckin.

Beyond copycats helping the first mover expand markets, they’re also an essential aspect of the proverbial first mover’s evolution. Huang and Blank instruct once again. Since they’re fully aware of how good they are, and that their work will be widely imitated because they’re so good, they know they must continue to evolve so that just as the competition is perfecting products and services that they’re already great at, they’re already moving on.

Which is a long way of saying two things: first is that what Baldacci views as a threat to his work has long been the norm in all other aspects of commerce. Second, writing can only be improved by the “theft” of ideas and styles exactly because the ease with which AI can reproduce based on existing knowns will force writers to constantly evolve in the way that CEOs and coaches already do.

Nvidia’s Huang adds that “In order to be a creature, you have to be conscious.” Implicit in the innovator’s assertion is that machines can’t replace us simply because they can’t evolve without us. But as human beings, we’re wired to evolve. Which is why writers should cheer what can reproduce what they’ve already done as a spur to get them to do what no one has ever done.