I wonder what those 15th-century monks who slaved away copying the Holy Scriptures by hand thought when they saw the first Bible produced on Johannes Gutenberg's printing press.

They had believed themselves to be irreplaceable in spreading the gospel. Now there was a cheaper, faster, more efficient way.

I empathize. I just read an academic paper published by Columbia University titled "Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers." That says it all. AI can write more engagingly than humans.

The authors of the paper asked expert writers from American universities to imitate the style of 50 major authors such as Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, Maya Angelou, and Kazuo Ishiguro. ChatGPT was asked to perform the same exercise. Its output was preferred for writing quality over that of the humans by both expert and lay readers.

The paper estimates a 100,000-word novel by ChatGPT costs $81 to generate. For me, it was at least a year's work to write any of my five published novels. Duplicating the output of ChatGPT, then, would pay me around 4 cents an hour.

The authors of the paper fine-tuned ChatGPT to get its results. I didn't bother with any tweaking when I asked ChatGPT to "Please write the opening paragraph of a novel written in the style of Keith Raffel."

Here's what he/she/they/it came up with:

The first time I saw the classified memo, it wasn't the secrets that made me nervous — it was the typos. You can tell a lot about a government from its grammar. A sloppy sentence here, a dangling clause there, and before you know it, someone's invading the wrong country. I'd spent a lifetime parsing both language and power — in Senate hearing rooms, Silicon Valley boardrooms, and, lately, in the quiet of my own conscience. But that morning, with the smell of burnt coffee and ambition in the air, I knew something was off — and that it was going to get worse.

I could guess the passage had been generated by ChatGPT because of its well-known tell — the overuse of dashes. But let's figure that tic will be fixed in a future release and overlook it. The critical question is: Would fans of my thrillers keep reading the book ChatGPT started? It might be a little over the top, but I suspect the answer is yes.

How much longer do I have to be the best novelist who writes in the style of Keith Raffel? ChatGPT had the nerve to tell me that its voice emulated the "Keith Raffel style of weaving the personal with the political, the past with the now." It even had the gall to ask, "Would you like me to continue for a few paragraphs, so it feels like the true (SET ITALOfirst page of a novel — establishing character, place, and the central tension?"

No thanks! What chutzpah!

Boy, I really do empathize with those monks. They'd slave away for months to produce a copy of the Bible, and Herr Gutenberg's printing press could replace their work with a more readable version in hours. Technology? Bah, humbug.

Even if you're willing to cut me some slack and say my own thrillers are better written than ChatGPT's imitations today, will that be true next year? Maybe. What about in five years? Maybe not.

I write this column each week, too. How would ChatGPT handle my style of opinion writing? I asked it to try writing a conclusion for this column. Here's what it came up with.

So, like those monks squinting by candlelight, I'll keep at it a little while longer — scratching ink onto parchment, so to speak — because the act of creation still matters, even when the machines can do it faster. They may match my syntax and steal my rhythm, but they can't feel the pulse behind the words, at least not yet. And when they finally can? Well, I hope some future algorithm looks back at me the way I look at those monks — with a little pity, a little awe, and a touch of gratitude for lighting the way.

Punctuation aside, it's not that bad, is it? It almost makes me, or it, seem human.

When it comes to our authorial careers, my fellow writers and I would do well to heed the 400-year-old words penned by the poet John Donne: "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

I, myself, am stubborn and have something to say. I will keep writing novels and columns because I need to in a way ChatGPT could never comprehend. Here's hoping there will still be readers for them.

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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Photo credit: Andrea De Santis at Unsplash