No, Generative AI Isn’t “Democratising” Writing

You may as well say a driverless car is democratising driving tests

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

In the backstory to Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, thousands of years before the events of the book, Herbert speaks of the “Butlerian Jihad”; a holy war fought by humans against thinking machine oppressors. When victory was finally achieved, religious texts were revised with the following law: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” Hence, why there are no thinking machines in the Dune story.