Aye aye: is AI our new writing frenemy?
On how Artificial Intelligence giveth with one hand and taketh with the other
Remember Rock School on BBC2? You’re older than you look if you saw it when it first came out from that far-off land called the 1980s.
May I offer a wee refresher if you need one, or a first look if you’re under 50 – here.
It was a brilliant how-to guide to perform rock, either on guitar, bass, drums or singing. Or that technology we might now call disruptive: synthesisers and other electronica.
I should warn you the keyboard player, Alastair Gavin, is wearing a serious case of braces.
Your grandparents will explain how, like smoking and letting dogs open their bowels on the pavement without any clear-up ops, that was considered socially acceptable at the time.
They did things differently then.
It’s the rock ‘tech’ bit that gives me a parallel with Artificial Intelligence (AI), because – as a drumming latecomer myself – I remember as if it was yesterday the TV show’s drummer Geoff Nicholls introducing the idea of the drum machine.
He encouraged human drummers to – far from becoming the equivalent of the fabled loom-destroying Ned Ludd in the Industrial Revolution – befriend the artificial pulse-maker.
I know. Radical thought.
But let’s run with it for our new post-industrial revolutionary software to which we can outsource some of our thinking and creating.
So can I befriend AI in the writing process, or is it looking to take my job?
In short: is it friend or foe?
The background
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world of creative writing, offering writers innovative tools to enhance their craft. From generating story ideas and refining language to suggesting plot twists and character development, AI is acting as a powerful collaborator in the writing process. With its ability to analyze vast amounts of data and offer instant feedback, AI not only helps overcome writer's block but also opens new avenues for experimentation, pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling. As this technology continues to evolve, its potential to transform the creative writing landscape is becoming increasingly apparent.
I’d like to think you’ve spotted the above paragraph was not written by me but by AI; specifically ChatGPT. The initials stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Don’t push me too much to explain that at a molecular level – you’ll need someone with a computer science degree, or at least a five-year-old.
But my understanding of it is you ask it something and it gives some kind of response.
I asked it to write the opening paragraph of an article explaining how AI can ‘help with creative writing’.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how the style is wordy, a bit dead-eyed, and sounds like a glossy brochure.
Thank God for that. At least it suggests there are some things I can do better.
But to be fair to the technology, I didn’t ask it to inject humour or to be brief, and I’m giving ChatGPT a chance to sell ChatGPT, so I can hardly froth at the mouth that it’s marking its own homework and coming across like an overkeen PR fresh out of uni.
Assistant or boss?
To return to our drum analogy the beatbox didn’t make Geoff redundant – he cannily suggested a truce and used it as an assistant.
In fact, I have a theory that the drum machine made drummers in the ’80s a bit flashier precisely as a land grab against the initial rudimentariness of the automated tech.
No electronic chips were going to outclass the mighty Stewart Copeland’s fine filigree on, say, the hi-hat from the off in the Police’s Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.
One writer I know has told me she thought we were no more than five years away from AI writing genre-fiction novels – her specialty. And that was more than a year ago.
So I see two main approaches with AI: either to cede territory to it without a fight and let it do the writing directly (under instruction from the author as to where the plot might go and who might be involved in it).
Or to take a more collaborative approach and use it to help with organising a writing project in the background. For instance, as you may have gathered, I’m writing about the Spanish Civil War in my second novel, My Nights with George Orwell, and I could ask some AI tool ‘how many British volunteers fought in the civil war?’ and ‘what were their backgrounds?’
That feels much healthier than asking ‘write me a battle scene set in 1937’. That really would be waving the white flag.
A problem and a plan
So far I’ve tiptoed round a rather large indoor elephant: the use of copyrighted material to ‘train’ the so-called large language models (LLMs) that underpin various forms of AI.
One writer I know has told me she thought we were no more than five years away from AI writing genre-fiction novels – her specialty. And that was more than a year ago.
I assume that genre fiction is more susceptible to the tech because it adopts a certain plot shape with fairly well-established reader expectations.
And where will the tech have learnt how to write such material? From copyrighted work by human authors, of course. And these authors are already seeing diminishing returns from their output.
In the UK the average author’s income fell from around £18k in 2006 to £7k by 2022. No surprise, then, that around 80% of writers in this country have other jobs.
Most writers aren’t on Richard Osman- or J. K. Rowling-sized pay packages.
Big tech says it’s got to have access to vast swathes of copyrighted material to incrementally improve AI, and the British government seems eager to have the door wide open to encourage the growth of this IT sector on these shores.
So how to square the circle of ever-decreasing writers’ remuneration with information-hungry systems?
I’ve got a radical idea: big tech should donate a good wodge of money to writers’ royalty organisations; ChatGPT is, as one example, owned by Microsoft, who aren’t short of a few bob. And they, along with other West-coast giants, are investing billions in this burgeoning area, so they clearly expect to be making concomitant amounts and more back over time.
Plus all that money Amazon has saved from its ‘creative’ tax approaches would go a long way among the writing community.
If the greedy tech bros start squealing it’s too complicated to calculate a fair disbursement of income I’ve got a simple response.
They could always try asking AI to do it for them.