We have long since passed the point where most of the traffic on the Internet is bots doing botty things. For example, there are days when more than nine out of ten visitors to this Magazine are bots reading the same article a thousand times over for inscrutable botty reasons, and then going on to read another article a thousand times, and then another. (We must say a word of appreciation to our host, DreamHost, which handles these sudden order-of-magnitude spikes in traffic without complaint.)
What you make of that observation, if you are a writer, is up to you. Dr. Boli chooses to write for humans; if other forms of intelligence also enjoy the articles, then he is happy to be of service to them. Perhaps he is less happy the thousandth time; but as long as he is not seriously inconvenienced, he welcomes nonhuman readers.
But it seems that, for many writers, the fact that bots are now the main audience is an important consideration.
For years, Dr. Boli has written everything in plain text with Markdown code for formatting. That way all the essential formatting—italics, headings, and so forth—is preserved in a form that can instantly be adapted to any form of publication. There is no complicated word-processor formatting that has to be undone every time the publishing format changes.
For most of that time, Markdown was a habit Dr. Boli shared mostly with hackers and academic writers. But then came the AI bots, and plain text with Markdown is their native language. Suddenly Markdown is everywhere.
In the old days of three or four years ago, there were sophisticated writing tools for academic writers who used Markdown, and many of those programs would use algorithms to analyze the readability of the written text. Dr. Boli always ignored those algorithms; he has the luxury of writing for educated adults, and therefore has no need to know whether a second-grader is expected to understand him.
Recently, however, he has noticed a trend among the many writing tools that use plain text with Markdown as their file format. Many of the recent ones will generate a readability score—but they are not asking how well humans can read your text. They are giving you a readability score for bots.
In other words, more and more humans are writing with the expectation that their primary audience will not be human. The dizzying development of artificial intelligence has already come to the point where we remaining organic life forms are asking ourselves, not what the bots can do for us, but how we can best serve the bots.
What does that mean? Well, it may mean that the human writer is becoming irrelevant. If, after all, the goal is to communicate efficiently with bots, then it is likely that bots can do that better. The most bot-readable text will be bot-generated.
But when the whole Internet is a mass of text written by bots to be read by bots, where does that leave us, the ordinary educated humans? It leaves us out of the loop. The bots don’t need us anymore.
And that means that we have no need to ask ourselves how well bots can read our text. Why would the bots care?
Dr. Boli has made this prediction before, but he will make it again. Professional writing will become entirely the domain of artificial intelligence. Already (and this is a subject for another article) we see abundant evidence that, in many circles, writing is no longer accepted as “professional” unless it has been generated by a bot.
This leaves writing by human beings in a different category. It becomes a craft. In the same way that painting a portrait in oil or acrylic is a skill that a few human artists still learn and enjoy; in the same way that knitting sweaters is still done in spite of the vast sweater-manufacturing plants in Malaysia—so the art of forming written words out of one’s own organic brain will be practiced by a few fanatically dedicated people. These artists will earn the same kind of admiration that painters and knitters earn from the non-artistic population: an appreciation of their skill as something superhuman, coupled with an inability to see any practical use in it.
The patrons of such human writers will be readers who expect some more direct connection with the spirit behind the writing than an artificial intelligence can provide for them. They may begin to demand books written by hand as evidence of the human mind behind the words. The art of the scribe may flourish as it has not flourished since before the days of Gutenberg.
Meanwhile, the bots can continue to produce writing for the bots, which will use what they have learned from it to produce more writing for more bots, and the squealy feedback loop can continue without any interference from grubby organic life forms like us.