If you’re looking to AI to assist you in any kind of writing endeavor, you should think again – because everyone involved knows for sure it is terrible at being creative.

It’s not surprising, really, when you realize that AI is “learning” by going through the internet and spitting out “new” versions of what they’ve sucked up along the way.

So, to assist their AI, companies are hiring poets, writers, and others with humanities degrees to assist.

The AI companies plan to feed these creatives’ work into their system in order to boost the quality of creative output – which is pretty dang depressing to anyone looking to make or maintain a career in writing.

The goal is to make AI seem actually creative, rather than appear to simply recycle the same jokes they find on the internet a hundred times over.

Professor Dan Brown says he can see why companies are racing to fill this particular void.

“The first company advantage in this space is incredibly big. If there are countries and languages for which companies are failing and somebody can come in and snap those space up, it’s an opportunity for them to wrap up the market before any new players can come in.”

There are, of course, concerns among writers that AI will eventually replace humans altogether, but AI creators say their work will “always include humans…it’s critical for developing responsible, safe, and accurate AI.”

At the moment it remains unclear whether feeding it original creative work will have the intended outcome, says lecturer Fabricio Goes.

“They are trained to reproduce. So, by design, many people argue that those systems are not creative.”

This is all without getting into murky issues like copyright infringement, which has already been the basis of many lawsuits filed by authors all over the world.

It gives one the feeling that this topic will get messier before it begins to untangle – if it ever does.