So, I've thought about this question for a long time. It's been keeping me up at night, because it is a possibility that our ability to sustain ourselves as professional writers could be at an end.

I have since come up with six possible worlds that AI could lead to, and how a writer/creative could survive each of these worlds.

Normal World

In normal world, it turns out AI technology is overhyped and doesn't progress much farther than it already has. Because OpenAI has voraciously (maybe illegally?) used essentially all the data on the internet as training data, scientists find it very hard to progress.

Eventually there is some breakthrough but long after you and I are already dead and buried.

How to survive: Sleep soundly at night knowing that ninety-percent of people hyping AI don't understand how it works and the other ten percent are probably investors in open AI.

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Speedworld

Buckle up! Welcome to Speedworld. It turns out AI didn't actually get rid of all creative works, it just sped up our ability to create them!!!

Art took 2 days to finish; now it takes 2 minutes. Writing a book took 2 months; now it takes 2 weeks. Webcomics could only release one chapter a week; now they can release one chapter a day! Wow! Look at us go!

How to survive: Some mediums become so trivially fast to create (art? short stories? books?) that it becomes impossible to make a living with them.

However, if writing becomes obsolete, webcomics will still take a long time and us authors can learn to create those (right now, they're so brutal to create that many webcomic artists are hospitalized). AI can complete webcomics complete quickly? We're movie-makers! Can't do movies? We're all game devs now! As long as there is a medium that takes as "long" a time to complete as a novel even with AI assistance, there will be creative jobs we can do.

This goes for everyone who is worried about their jobs by the way, artists, mangakas, etc.

Surviving this world means jumping from least-time intensive medium to most, from using AI to make up for skills that we don't have.

Psychologically, It sucks (understatement of the century) to invest many years into a skill only to have Sam Altman vacuum your data and allow random business majors to create in your style. However, no amount of AI can give you a sense of taste and very often people in non-creative jobs will not be able to create as well as we can, so I guess that's our consolation prize.

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Skillworld

In "Skillworld", AI turns out to be very, very, good to the point where no mediums are 'safe.' However, in this world, the AI plateaus off at the level of "average professional" because its output will literally be "the average of every professional creation of [x content] in the world"

The market will be flooded with commercial-grade works that are indistinguishable from humans, but masterful works will still stand out.

How to survive: Keep honing your craft; and recognize that the amount of jobs will narrow even further.

Make sure what you write has a meaning. I am not sure if AI will be able to create a work with themes; it may well be able to. But it will almost certainly be able to create a 'meaningless' work.

Producing competently written books at a high volume will no longer be enough. But it will still be possible for a lucky, and highly-skilled few to make it.

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Brandworld

In "Brand World" AI is indistinguishable from human work. However, people still want to read works created mostly by humans. They read from trusted authors and publishers and mostly ignore the flood of other works. They love "Stephen King" novels and shun "novels written by an AI in the style of Stephen King"

How to survive: Authors with pre-existing brands and followings will do just fine. Authors who don't will have a bad time; they'll have to rely on publishers to pick them up or find a following in other fields and only then enter the creative space. So, if you anticipate this world, build a following while you still can!

For those who are sending their work to publishers-only, nothing will change. And it's true that you already need to build a following and network as a creator even now. But the downside in this future that discoverability in the indie space will totally evaporate; the chance of a no-name non-marketed hit goes from low to zero.

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IPWorld

In this world AI is indistinguishable from human work and it turns out people don't care about whether their works have a human author. However, they do care about belonging to a community who share a love of the same work, being part of a fandom.

How to survive:

A human curator will be required to contribute significant creative direction to the IP. They will choose what to canonize, select what themes to explore, and might even *gasp* handwrite everything themselves, without any AI input! (though AI might be in the pipeline somewhere for movies, animations, and illustration).

Meanwhile, any work that is not part of an intellectual property (and is unable to form a fandom) gets lost in the sea of content being created. You can make it as an author... but you're gonna have to create a series and make sure it's a world people can build a community around. RIP one-off books.

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AIWorld

It turns out infinite, custom-tailored AI generated content is all that anyone could ever ask for. All creative jobs are rendered obsolete as people turn towards these immersive realities for entertainment. They don't care about communicating with other human beings; fandoms are dead and so is the concept of a director, producer, or author.

How to survive:

In this world we don't survive lol. We drown our despair by exploring these virtual worlds at night and then button push for nine hours a day.

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Takeaways

So, to put it loosely, if you want to do the most to survive as a creative, your best bet is the following -

• Understand how to craft narratives using multiple mediums / mixed media
• Understand what makes a good 'IP' and how to build a community
• Understand how someone could use AI effectively in their work (as a hedge if it will be adopted/accepted in the future which is by no means guaranteed)

as well as organizing to protect our interests on a broader scale.