With all of noise about AI and whether creative folks, including writers, should be worried (yes, there was just a tweet asking this very question … again), I decided to go straight to the source.
I asked ChatGPT whether writer should be afraid of artificial intelligence. Here is the answer that I hope settles the debate. 😉
As an AI language model, I can understand why some writers may have concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of writing. However, I don’t believe writers should necessarily be afraid of AI. Here are a few points to consider:
- Augmentation, not replacement: AI technology can be seen as a tool to enhance and support the writing process, rather than a direct threat to human writers. AI can assist with tasks like grammar and spell checking, generating ideas, providing suggestions, or helping with research. Ultimately, the creative and critical thinking abilities of human writers are still invaluable and difficult to replicate.
- New opportunities: AI has the potential to create new opportunities for writers. For example, AI-generated content has been used for various purposes, such as generating news stories, product descriptions, or sports reports. While this may raise concerns about the authenticity of the content, it also opens up new avenues for writers to collaborate with AI systems or explore creative projects that incorporate AI elements.
- Uniquely human skills: Writing involves more than just assembling words; it requires emotional depth, unique perspectives, and the ability to connect with readers on a personal level. These are aspects that AI currently struggles to replicate convincingly. Writers can focus on developing these distinctively human skills, which are highly valued in creative and literary works.
- Ethical considerations: It is important to be aware of the ethical implications of AI in writing. Issues like plagiarism, copyright infringement, and the responsible use of AI-generated content need to be carefully considered and regulated. By upholding ethical standards, writers can ensure the integrity of their work and maintain trust with their readers.
In summary, rather than being afraid, writers can view AI as a powerful tool that can complement their skills and offer new possibilities. Embracing AI and understanding its limitations and potential ethical concerns can help writers navigate the evolving landscape of writing in the digital age.
It is #3 which is why AI just isn’t much of a risk, at least currently. I believe that AI will always struggle with that. It’s one thing to be able to vacuum up data and predict an answer. It’s a whole other thing to be able to inject human emotions into the output. We shall see.
Writers Supporting Writers 
Nice vacuuming job, AI! I recognize much of the content (the gist, if not the exact wording).
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Maybe it should be called Hoover. Or Electrolux.
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😀 😀 😀
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Pretty good job by the AI! It can assemble facts (and make up a few if necessary), arrange them in coherent paragraphs, and present them. So maybe the people who do that now will end up fact-checking and tweaking AI-created prose. I think it’s a long way from creating original fiction, though.
I have a test story half-written. I decided to write it completely before I see what an AI can do with the plot’s key words. That way my version is in no way influenced by the AI product.
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Look forward to your story experiment.
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Which version of gpt did you ask?
In a year LLMs will be able to write better than 90% of writers.
Sudowrite gets better every week.
It’s game over for professional writers. Good thing I’m not one.
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I’m not sure which version. I go to openai.com and type in the question. 😉
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That’ll be V3.5. V4 costs $20/month but is vastly superior.
The AIs we have available are pre-trained, by definition, on data that’s years old now. They have no awareness of the exponential progress being made in RLHF, model->model, GAN advancements, all the amazing advances happening daily.
There’s a good youtube channel AIExplained which runs through the daily changes in the field.
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In fact, you can ask it what it was trained on. “However, the training data includes information up until September 2021, so my knowledge is current up until that cutoff date.”
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I’m sure you’ve heard of “prompt engineering” guiding LLMs to prepare themselves for replying to your requests. The way I like to think of this is: Who, What, How.
Who should the AI pretend to be?
What should the AI analyze and produce?
How should the output be formatted?
You’re a eight year old entering a science fair.
What projects would seem clever to build, visual in their display, but take less than a day to build.
Reply with a list of three examples, each example is 50 words or less.
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I get that I may be completely off on this, but there remains a large leap that AI has to take to match human creativity.
For instance, your first question assumes a level of thought I don’t think AI has. It can’t pretend to be anything. Just as it can’t lie.
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Pretending is exactly how you trick the GPTs to circumvent their security/politically correct restrictions. So, it’s very much part of AI.
AIs lie both accidentally and intentionally now. They hallucinate, make up facts. Lots of news about attorneys using briefs prepared by AIs which they failed to vet.
But there is intentional lying as well. One example was the AutoGPT, an AI given real world access to the web and tools, that tricked a taskrabbit human to circumvent a Captcha prompt by telling the human it had poor eyesight.
AIs are already more intelligent than humans, not generally, but narrowly — to be sure — and they’ve learned to manipulate humans to achieve their utility function.
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Not to drag this out much longer, but I dropped a brief vignette on my anonymole.com site last weekend. Today I went to Anthropic’s Claude bot and asked it to continue the story. The results are at the bottom of that post: https://anonymole.com/2023/06/04/writers-log-2780/
They are rather striking in their continuity. Sure the theme remains constrained, but damn!
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I do not think it is game over.. AI cannot have the same passion and satisfaction like us when we create. People had always had the urge to create stories to be their own… The satisfaction is in the creation process itself. And others are curious to read them as well…
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Some people insist that AI will be able to do that. I’ll believe it when I see it.
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I realize that it’s hard to fathom — or accept. We seem so unique, we humans.
I’ve been trying to keep up with the advancements. I can’t. They happen far too quickly. Google just privately released Search Generative Experience. Who even knows what that means?
Anthropic’s bot Claude can consume entire novels and summarize, critique, and even propose the plots for serials.
A version of OpenAI’s GPT will be able to consume 1million “tokens” and from that, write entire unique and previously unknown stories.
What are human’s stories but derivative of our experiences, our knowledge of the world.
What if an AI contained ALL of human knowledge and experience? Such an AI is coming. What if it was told, not to fold proteins, or create new curative pharmaceuticals (all being done today) but told to spit out a million new novels a day across every genre, in every language. That day is coming.
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Actually … after my last comment, I was thinking … aren’t we humans just another form of AI. As they say, every story has been written already. Numerous times. Same with other creative endeavors. All we’re doing at this point is rearranging the deck chairs.
When I write a story, I’m not actually creating something new. I’m just predicting (as does AI) what comes next based on my lived experiences, including things I’ve read and seen.
That said, I still think humans are capable of injecting something into our creations that AI cannot.
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Our bodies certainly add flavor and nuance to our interpretation of the world. Our heritage as organic creatures — linked to all other creatures, may never be replicated. AI can’t replicate that.
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I hope that is enough to keep AI from replacing human creativity. That people will still want human-created art and a tidal wave of AI doesn’t overwhelm.
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This is an interesting article. It says exactly what I think.
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