Computer says - everything. N M Browne

 When we dreamed of a future with robots, we dreamed by and large of a world where they did the grunt work and we humans had the fun, having the time to explore our creativity. It isn't working out that way. New forms of AI can not only write you an essay on any subject you like but make a passable, if derivative stab at writing poetry, film scripts, stories. I never thought I'd be rendered irrelevant by computers and when I read a computer generated example of Anglo Saxon poetry I panicked. 

I am still trying to assimilate what it means and I feel as though the Borg are assimilating me.

 In one way this development is not surprising. The concept of super intelligent machines has been the staple of SF for years and what humans can imagine we often try to create. 

We learn by reading, by copying: we emulate forms, emotions and experiences by reading about them. AI can just do it better because it can learn from all and any digitised material. Of course it has never experienced the emotion it can convey, it can write about experiences it has never lived, but don't we as writers do that too?

When I was a nerdy 'A' level student my tutor was of the school of thought that claimed the author did not matter only their words. I was shocked by that at the time. It mattered enough to me that PG Wodehouse broadcast for the Nazis that I could never again find him funny. The recent furore of JK Rowlings views has demonstrated that the person of the writer, their beliefs and life choices matters to many. But perhaps my tutor was right: would it matter if Shakespeare turned out to have been an AI caught up in some loop in time? 'His'  words would still resonate through time. Perhaps what matters is not whether he was a biological man but that his words come from distilled human experience and are reimagined, recreated in every production of his plays, every reading of his poetry by readers, human beings: creativity is required in reading as well as writing.

 I am still panicking a little and I feel some Luddite within me, urging restriction. Then I talk to myself. Some future AI will undoubtedly write better poetry than me. They will be building poetry from the raw material of art: the output of the greatest writers. They may find patterns in their greatness that elude me, they may spark a response in human beings that is as meaningful to the human reader as anything written by those greats. Even were this to be so, I don't think human writers will become obsolete. 

 When I write I am engaging parts of myself that are otherwise dormant: the effort of communication, the search for the right word, for honesty and the balanced sentence are pleasurable in and of themselves. When I write I am speaking about what it feels like to be in my head, and if anyone chooses to listen, I have told them something that only I can say and I got something profound from doing it. 

So what if our ability to write is not unique, if non human things can do it too? Did we ever only write from a sense of uniqueness? Don't we do not just because we can but because we must?

I am still panicking, but I am still writing.