Why Would You Ask AI To Tell The Story Of Your Own Life?

Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job, there are like a hundred thousand would-be writers, if not far more than that. Plenty of world-historically excellent writers have gone their whole adult lives without ever making a steady living off their writing; plenty of the best and hardest-working writers presently alive are not doing writing as their primary source of income, nor even as a regularly gainful supplement to their main job. If all else—pay, benefits, security, steadiness of work—were equal, the list of adults who would trade their existing career for a job in which their primary task was to write about things would have much of the human race on it.

This has been true for generations. Many people, when they hear someone say that they are a writer, go ahead and take for granted that what this actually means is "I'm unemployed" or, at best, "I am a substitute teacher." When young people tell their parents they want to study creative writing in college, or say that their career ambition is to be a writer, the words "BACKUP PLAN" flash in red neon in their parents' minds, accompanied by klaxon alarms. Any decent person who actually makes a living via writing will freely admit the crucial role that dumb luck has played in making that possible: either accidents of birth or accidents of opportunity have blessed them.

People write for free. People write things they will never show to another living soul, just for the sheer expressive fulfillment of writing them. People slave away at novels for years, for decades, with nothing but the faintest ludicrous hope that a professional editor might ever do more than glance at the manuscript before chucking it into the trash. People work full-time jobs, tend to their kids and pets, spend time with their partners, and then stay up all night writing Letterboxd movie reviews, because they have something inside of them that can come out no other way. People drive for Uber and Doordash, wait tables, substitute teach, for years and years, all for the flexibility to spend their free time pursuing opportunities to get paid a few cents a word for the thing they love doing the most in all the world. Forget about getting paid to write: People pay money to write, with neither hope nor intention of ever making their money back. People leap at opportunities to get paid in "exposure" for their writing. People send fully written articles to the Defector tips email inbox with notes like If you decide to run this, I don't care about getting paid, just make sure you don't use my real name in the byline or I'll get in trouble with the university where I work.