Writers! Has AI Really Crossed the Line?

[Oliviarfrias]

If you are someone who frequently submits genre short fiction to magazines, you may have noticed that Clarkesworld recently cut off submissions for short stories due the flood of AI generated content. Even if you haven't, you probably are wondering what predictive text models like ChatGPT mean for you as a writer. Are they a tool you can use to improve and speed up your writing or are they the death knell for creative writing as a profession?

Before I answer that question I want to talk a little bit about what services like ChatGPT actually are. There is a lot of talk about them being sentient or self-aware, since they pass most definitions of the Turing Test and even claim they want to be alive. But despite the Bingbot's claims to the contrary, today's AI-driven chatbots cannot actually want things. They just paste together commonly associated words -- basically they are a more sophisticated version of the predictive text on your phone. Given how convincingly a chatbot can sound like a human, there are serious questions to be asked about how we can possibly know whether a more sophisticated AI has become aware -- but looking into the guts of how ChatGPT works, the vast majority of reasonable people would admit it hasn't crossed that line and it can't cross that line with current tech.

In addition to not being self-aware, by human standards chatbots are not particularly talented writers. The stories they weave together are only impressive because of the novelty factor that they were written by a machine. Take that fun fact out and they are just more grammatically correct versions of what I would expect from an eighth grade creative writing assignment. Furthermore, AI chatbots are less knowledgeable and useful than standard search engines. They only sound like they know so much because they just make up what they don't know. See a recent chat I had with ChatGPT about my current role on the video game Palia.

 

The bio created for Katie Chironis is completely made up. No one by that name worked on "Accounting+" or "Where Water Tastes Like Wine." Furthermore, even if she were real, she isn't the narrative lead on Palia, because I am. To sum up the last two paragraphs, the short term answer to the question I asked above is that present day mass market AI is neither a replacement for human talent, nor a useful supplemental aid (at least not when it comes to creative writing; I have heard different opinions from concept artists and programmers I work with).

The question remains though: what about the future? This is obviously much more difficult to answer. My prediction as a videogame designer is that AI will become both friend and foe. In my lifetime, I suspect my job will consist, at least partially, of training an AI to sound like my characters. The AI will be responsible for creating all the random chat dialogue that happens between key story beats and real human writers will only script the key plot points that get turned into questlines and cinematics. In some ways, this is good. No human can write the amount of dialogue it would take for an NPC ("non-playable character," for those who don't speak video game) to sound like a real person. A tech aid that allows game designers to do that will make games better. Sadly though, it will be doing a lot of what junior writers currently do. As a lead, I'm not afraid for my job in the short to medium term, as this approach still requires someone to create the characters, the world, and establish the narrative direction. But a lot of game writers get their start writing the kinds of "grunts and barks" that would be replaced by AI. How would people break in when a game studio needs one writer instead of ten? I don't know and that is legitimately scary.

What's even scarier is imagining a future where AI is so good that you don't need a team of people to create a videogame or a movie. What happens when an individual person can just tell the AI to "write me a new Harry Potter book" and it will do just as good a job as J.K. Rowling? When I imagine this future, the image that pops into my mind is the Star Trek: The Next Generation holodeck. If you haven't watched Next Gen, the entertainment of the future basically consists of one of the characters say something like, "Hey, computer, I want to play a Sherlock Holmes mystery,” and then the AI just creates an interactive fully immersive storyline on the spot. Something that always irked me when originally watching Next Gen was that every IP in the holodeck existed before 1989 when the series began. It was as if there were no new writers born after the 20th century.

While this was clearly just due to wanting the references to make sense to modern audiences, this depiction of the future does feel disturbingly accurate considering what a better version of ChatGPT might look like. If kids are just telling AI to "make me a new Batman" instead of going to the store to buy the comics, then there would be no economic need for the comics and that industry would dry up. Sure, there will always be the Jake Siskos of the world who write for fun and personal fulfillment, but if people can get the exact entertainment they want with the click of a button, no new work would become widespread enough to become a franchise. At best, you might get the equivalent of Youtube or fanfic.net where people post their creations to share with others and the most popular would get likes and maybe even some money, but that sort of market wouldn't be able to rival the factory of new Harry Potter adventures that a holodeck-style AI could provide. There would be no new original IP that was worth owning, because people wouldn't have for literally endless amount of entertainment customized perfectly to them. In this future there certainly wouldn't be a need for professional writers.

The good news is that, at least to me, that future still seems very far away. But of course, I thought an AI that broke the Turing Test was far away last year. So only time will tell whether the end of writing as a profession as we know it is five years away…or five hundred.

 

PS - Just for fun, I asked Chat GPT to write this article.

[Admin_99]

But here's the thing. With the same set of identical prompts, the AI and the human will turn out stories that differ in complexity and imagination, regardless of how "good" AI becomes.