Automation is coming, and while some proponents say it will allow humans to live a life of leisure, the reality is that artificial intelligence is taking people's jobs, leaving them searching for other ways to make a living. For a long time, artists believed they were immune to automation. Surely a robot could never come up with anything as creative as a Picasso? It would be impossible for AI to replace Shakespeare, right? But as AI advances, such statements have become much less certain.
With the rise of ever-more sophisticated AIs like ChatGPT, there has been a lot of speculation that writers might soon be out of work. A few weeks ago, some journalists began to panic amid reports that the technology news website CNET had deployed AI to compose stories. However, things quickly calmed down when it became apparent that many of the stories it wrote were inaccurate, dull and plagiarized. So, AI is unlikely to replace journalists soon, it seems.
Rather than fearing the rise of ChatGPT and its AI siblings, writers might do better to recognize their potential as assistants that can aid and improve their work.
ChatGPT is based on a form of AI known as "deep learning", which is a technique that aims to make computers "think" in the same way as humans. Deep learning is about replicating the neural networks of the human brain, allowing AI models to draw upon the knowledge within enormous datasets. ChatGPT was reportedly using 175 billion parameters, and trained on a massive corpus of text that includes millions of books, the entire English-language Wikipedia, and more besides.
Ever since it was launched by OpenAI last year, discussions around how ChatGPT and other types of AI will impact the art of writing have spread like wildfire. There are many who believe AI will never be able to replace human writers. They argue that AI doesn't actually create anything "new", as such, but rather just rearranges stuff that has been written by humans previously. Then there are others who believe AI will leave millions of writers out of work. While novelists might be safe, the work of technical writers and journalists could one day be replicated by machines.
Most likely the reality will be something in the middle. Writers and AI will learn to coexist, with humans using their deep learning-based counterparts to enhance and improve their prose. Indeed, some writers have already begun experimenting with AI to enhance their work. The Canadian-born American journalist and fiction writer Vauhini Vara recently described to LitHub how she used an AI model developed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI as an assistant to help her pen an essay about her sister, who had died from Ewing sarcoma many years before. Her sister's death deeply affected Vara, and she had avoided writing about the topic due to that. So she wondered if this new AI tool could help her to describe the feelings she was afraid of confronting, and put them into words. What resulted was not one, but nine essays, with each one progressively adding more detail from her life.
Vara explained that the first essays were somewhat odd, adding random details that were not true. However, as she added more information, the model was able to write text that was much closer to reality.
AI-assisted writing could be beneficial in many areas. For instance, a small business owner such as a plumber or electrician, who's aiming to make a website that describes the services they offer, may not be much of a writer. They could perhaps use an AI model to create the text for their website, then either polish it up themselves or hire an editor to do it for them.
AI could also help in more creative projects. The Quest of Evolution is a unique project in the writing world that uses blockchain and non-fungible token (NFTs) technology to enable writers to collaborate on so-called "crypto-novels" that are co-written by multiple authors. The writer purchases the NFT, which represents an unfinished novel, and by doing so they gain the rights to add the next chapter in that story. After they're done writing, they can sell the NFT to the next writer, earning money for doing so. In addition, the NFT is also programmed so that they'll continue earning royalties from all future sales, along with all of the previous co-authors.
The intriguing aspect is that, with AI, it's not necessary to be a talented writer to participate in a crypto-novel. Someone who acquires a crypto-novel NFT could simply use an AI-assistant to help them create the next chapter by using their ideas as prompts. The AI would then evolve the existing story, based on the NFT owner's inputs.
The optimistic view is that AI may ultimately prove itself as an extremely valuable tool for writers, changing the game just as the introduction of typewriters, and later computers with word processors did. A good example of how things might pan out is Sudowrite, an app that's designed to help people overcome writer's block. The human starts by telling a story, and Sudowrite's AI tracks what's being written and offers suggestions as to what to write next. It can also help clean up text by rewriting what has already been written down, using more colorful words. In this way, AI may transform the job of writers into something that's more similar to the role of editors. They'll use AI to generate the bare bones text, before crafting it into more beautiful prose.
The rise of AI is likely to have a big impact on writing, and will result in both new solutions and also new problems. There's a big discussion around the negative impacts of AI, for example, which could be used to create disinformation and "fake news". It's not clear how this can be prevented, and such downsides could well keep human writers in their jobs for some time to come.
