For me the big question concerning AI and writing is ‘why’?
I can understand, sort of, the use of AI for research. The results are potentially accurate assuming the algorithm has accessed enough web sites for its data. I’m prepared to accept them, though I am forced to admit there may be a high degree of English-speaking or Western bias in there. I can’t imagine the data centres scouring the earth after translating my enquiry into Hindi or Chinese, trawling through the thousands of Asian websites and neatly assimilating those results into something I might understand if I read it.
The drawback is that AI will always be averaging the results, where my online research may throw up some tasty and interesting morsels that are far more to my liking.
I can understand, sort of, the use of AI for producing a formulaic novel which is perfectly formed with its inciting moments and resolution at the exact point where the formula determines they should be. A bit like predicting a murder on the tv because an ad break is due. The danger is that all antagonists and protagonists will be predictable, along with the plotlines, locations, vocabulary, blah, blah. The novel will be homogenised, flat and probably boring. But if you can write a book with no effort and make some money out of it, why not? But it no longer qualifies as writing.
I can’t understand why any creative writer would even consider using AI for anything. Those of us who write regularly know we are unlikely to make any money from it, unless we are ghost writing for some celebrity. It seems every celebrity nowadays has a talent for writing novels and is cashing in on their fame and name.
No, I can’t understand getting AI involved because, for most of us, there is as much pleasure and achievement in writing the book as there is in selling it. And, if you write it the creative world opens up for you. No restrictions on… just about anything. Create your own world, your own language, play around with timelines and narrators and structure. Could AI have written Wuthering Heights? No. By the time you had entered your specs and responded to endless AI bot queries, you could probably have written half a dozen chapters. Could AI have written Gulliver’s Travels or, to inch it up to the modern day, Gormenghast or 1984 or Wolf Hall. No. The data centres would have used half the world’s resources before it came close to such achievements.
Therein are the reasons we read and write. We want to be removed from the mean, the average, the homogenised. We want to imagine and create our heroes and villains, our lovers and friends with all the personalities and idiosyncrasies that make them ‘real’.
