There was quite a long piece in The Verge recently about AI writing tools – specifically Sudowrite. Sudowrite is a piece of software based on Open AI’s language model GPT-3. These kinds of tools are particularly interesting to me because I studied artificial intelligence as an undergraduate and have made a living writing fiction about it. So the concept of an AI tool that helps people write fiction is certainly intriguing.
I think it’s worth mentioning at the outset that I think the term “AI” is used pretty freely these days – especially with respect to GPT-3. GPT-3 is not, in my opinion, artificially “intelligent.” It’s a terrific mimic of form and content but it is almost immediately obvious there is no real thought process behind what it does. It looks for patterns in what is submitted and then compares those patterns to a staggeringly large amount of data. When it finds similar patterns in that data, it then regurgitates those patterns under the principal they will “match” what was submitted and thus “create” something in the vein of what was requested. This is how GPT-3 mimics conversations and how Sudowrite mimics writing (and also how, using the visual equivalent, DALL-E makes “art.”)
I have to say, Sudowrite is just as amusing as DALL-E. For example, I plugged “a story about an ant colony” into its “twists” tool and it spat back this as one of the science fiction suggestions:
“On the way to the meeting, Dave stumbles across Brad and Jennifer, naked and engaged in intimate activities. When asked what she’s doing, Brad proudly holds up a box of ants. As Dave realizes that this is not just another ant farm, he watches in horror as the ants swarm and devour the two.”
Then I changed the genre to literary fiction and it gave me this as one suggestion:
“The Queen ant is actually a bitter, neurotic old lady in her mid-50s. She is having an affair with a widowed academic in his 60s. The protagonist discovers this in a shocking climax.”
Both suggestions are simultaneously accurate representations of genre and totally absurd.
I also spent some time playing with the “rewrite tool” for my own texts, inputting the plot from the screenplay I sold to Steven Spielberg and also text from my book, “How To Pass As Human”. The results were interesting. While none of them were wholesale useful, they did spark some thoughts I hadn’t had before on my own.
This brings us back to The Verge article. At different points in it, Sudowrite is compared to tools like a thesaurus or encyclopedia. And this, I think is valid.
After all, is it any different than a painter using many specialized brushes, paints, and surfaces instead of just his finger and a small range of mineral-based colors on a cave wall?
We do not create in a vacuum. As much as the myth of the solitary artist creating something from nothing continues to be a part of the modern narrative, the reality is that we draw from experience, from knowledge, and from Google. The best ideas I’ve ever had have been triggered by newspaper articles or histories or simply a comment someone made at a party. So it’s really not so different if Sudowrite suggests my protagonist should be riding a unicorn naked down Fifth Avenue instead of taking a cab across London. I probably won’t use the suggestion directly, but it might trigger something better than what I already had.
I highly doubt I’ll be using Sudowrite at all. It seems too cumbersome and involved – the suggestions are so detailed that I think, for me, I would become too bogged down in meeting them halfway. But I can see that for other writers, it might be a fantastic tool.
The trick, though, in the long term, will be if we can avoid the slippery slope of dependence. And this is what worries me a little about Sudowrite and any future “real” AI that does any number of other things for us. It’s not that it might decide to wipe us out, but that we might wipe ourselves out through sheer laziness.
I don’t mean exterminate our physical beings, but rather our minds and selves – what makes us human beings.
Here is a banal example. When I was much younger, I had memorized several dozen phone numbers. My parents, my relatives, my closest friends, my favorite stores, etc. Now, thanks to carrying an electronic phonebook with me at all times, I have memorized maybe a half dozen.
Here is a slightly less banal example. There is solid empirical evidence that people are losing their sense of direction en masse thanks to our growing dependence on GPS mapping software (and its tendency to default to not displaying the map with North always up).
There are, of course, dozens and dozens of other examples of how if technology makes something easier for us, we rely on it to the point where we lose the ability to do the thing the technology can now do for us.
This is not particularly tragic when it comes to memorizing phone numbers. It’s slightly more tragic when it comes to our sense of direction. But when it comes to art, that seems to me to be an example of what I mean by “extermination of self.”
If we reach a point in human evolution where we have invented a tool that contributes more than some minor percentage to our works of art, why, exactly, would we even bother living?
WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW THIS POINT IN ITALICS IS THE CONCLUSION TO THE ABOVE ESSAY PROCESSED THROUGH SUDOWRITE.
I took everything after the phrase, “But I can see that for other writers, it might be a fantastic tool,” and asked Sudowrite to rephrase it with more “inner conflict.”
What’s absolutely fascinating is that it completely inverted the meaning of the essay. What this suggests to me is that the vast majority of articles and essays out there about technology are actually enthusiastic about our growing dependence on computer-based tools and what I term “erasure of self.” Sudowrite spotted the pattern of what I was discussing and then mimicked the common direction of such an essay. The result was to encourage its own use.
I guess a machine doesn’t need to be truly intelligent to be capable of irony.
“The good news, however, is that I don’t think such a future is inevitable. True, the choice between Sudowrite and the flesh and blood artist is already a slippery slope, but I am confident that it is not a slope that we will slide down. After all, how dependent are we already on tools that take over some of our more mundane tasks in order to free us up to be creative?
For example, am I not free now to work on my poems as much because I can compose them on a computer as because I physically do so?
Similarly, I can barely remember back to a time when I didn’t have a cell phone, not because I was an unconnected social outcast in desperate need of immediate access to the other members of my species (which of course we all might have been) but because the phone was infinitely more convenient than the pager that it replaced. And who was I going to call before my friends had cell phones anyway?
Here is another example. When I was a child and my family travels involved anything more than an hour or so of driving away from home (a fairly common occurrence as we gardened all over the United States), my parents could be certain that they would receive a phone call between the time they pulled out of our driveway and wherever they stopped for lunch. They could use the navigational instruments in their car to get them there but they’d still almost always pull over to consult the map before they headed off again. Nowadays, we don’t even own a paper map anymore. We use Google’s maps feature in our cell phones instead. The GPS’ built-in maps are easily as accurate (and probably more so). That’s not even mentioning how much more convenient Google’s maps are when it comes to rerouting us around traffic, choosing alternate routes around construction closures or just putting us back on the road if we’ve gotten lost.
But that’s always a danger, and is particularly true within the arts.
That’s not a problem when it comes to phone numbers—though, come to think of it, are we all so attached to our phones that most of can’t even memorize phone numbers anymore? It’s an interesting point. But it doesn’t matter: There are very few jobs that require more than a handful of phone numbers, so even a near-total reliance on phones would leave you with a viable profession.
Who cares if you can’t memorize phone numbers? We survive.”