Will Human Writers Be Extinct In The Near Future?

This is the question that comes to mind when an artificial intelligence picks up the pen and paper to write a story. Thanks to researchers from the Future University in Hakodate, two categories of writers currently exist; The human writers and the AI writers. The researchers wrote a short novel titled Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi which means “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel” co-written by an artificial intelligence which they developed. The story is about an AI who abandons its duties to humanity after discovering its talent for writing. The novel was submitted to the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, and it made it through the first round. This is the first time the organizers of the literary awards allowed submissions from machines.
How did the AI achieve this feat? The researchers assigned a gender to the central character and developed a basic outline of the plot after which they assembled a list of words, phrases, and sentences to be incorporated in the story. The AI then used these tools to create an intelligent and fascinating text. Among the 1,450 novels received for this year’s competition, 11 were human/AI collaborations. The good thing is, judges are not told which stories are written by AI’s or human throughout the four rounds of the competition. The team’s story made it past the first round but were eventually eliminated because, sci-fi novelist and award judge, Satoshi Hase, explained that the story lacked sufficient character development despite being well-structured.
The fact that a novel written by an AI could pass the first stage of a competition leads one to ponder on the many possibilities that could lead to AI’s being specifically designed to write books of various genres and the threat of extinction it poses to human writers as AI’s will be programmed and taught human behavior, thoughts, actions, reactions and so on. In my opinion, writers have nothing to fear as AI’s can never be creative writers. They lack the human factor which is the ability to sympathize or empathize with your characters, the ability to twist a plot in such a way that it resonates with the reader, creating that feeling of sadness, anger, love. If in some way, an AI is able to achieve any of this, it still can never be a creative writer because it will simply spit out what it is fed. Garbage in, garbage out.
What are your thoughts? Will AI’s make better writers than human writers? Will they erase the relevance of human writers? Do human writers have cause to worry? Are we screwed? Let us banter thoughts in the comment section.