Artificially Intelligent or Intelligently Artificial? by Debbie Bennett

(c) Mikko Paananen, CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

AI. Artificial Intelligence. I’m sure there have been many posts here and elsewhere on this topic as we all become more and more outraged about how the machines are taking over the world. People are polarised in opinion – either it frees us all to be artists, or Skynet is on the horizon and before we know it, Arnie will be hunting us down! 

Actually, the first thing I think of when I hear the term is the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. A hauntingly beautiful modern retelling of Pinocchio where a little robot longs to be a real human boy. I love this film. But then I have fond childhood memories of a beautifully-illustrated hardback book of the Pinocchio story and used to dress up as the Blue Fairy when I was little!

But AI in writing is a relatively recent thing. I suspect it’s been around for years, quietly scraping content from the internet without our knowledge or permission. After all it has to learn from something, right? But before we all start screaming that it’s taking over our jobs and soon real human writers will be obsolete, remember that there is as much awful content on the internet as there is good stuff. For every carefully-drafted, edited and re-edited novel uploaded to Amazon KDP, there are thousands of low-content workbooks, hundreds of ‘novels’ written by somebody who saw a YouTube video that told them it was a great way to Get Rich Quick. AI isn’t discriminating; it hoovers everything and I doubt there is yet an efficient way of analysing the quality of the content it’s sucking up and digesting.

I’m a member of several writer groups on Facebook, of varying membership and content. Sometimes I enjoy looking at somebody else’s short piece and offering feedback – writers can learn a lot from knowing what not to do, and how different people put words together. The other day somebody posted maybe half a page of completely unedited writing. Clearly English was not their first language, but even they admitted it was a first draft and they hadn’t done any spell-checking or looked at the grammar. Let’s ignore the fact that you should never ask for feedback on something that isn’t as good as you can make it at that moment in time. Of course things will change and there will be further edits, but it’s disrespectful to invite comments on something you already know needs more work. 

generated by the prompt 'clasping hands'

Gencraft.com

So, said writer inevitably got dozens of comments on spelling, grammar etc etc. An hour later she’d loaded an edited version that was so far away from the first version, that it might as well have been written by a different person. And there’s the point – I suspect it was written by a different person. Or maybe even a non-person. An AI. I suspect she’d simply stuffed the first version into ChatGPT or some other AI engine, and uploaded what came out the other end.

If you look for AI writing, you will start seeing it. It hides in plain sight, but after a while you get a feel for the style and the use of words. The very fact it's machine-driven means it inevitably regurgitates the same stuff, even allowing for style. If you ask ChatGPT to imitate a famous writer, it invariably will, but if you don't specify, it will generate its own style - and that becomes more recognisable, the more you see and analyse it. It's something about the blandness of the writing, the lack of pace or tension, the genericness of the piece. I don't think us authors are at risk yet.

We are only now in late 2023 figuring out the implications of AI in the arts. I believe Amazon now asks you to disclose whether (or not?) you used AI in the creation of a book. I'm not certain of whether that is simply art, or includes writing. There is - as yet - no direct ban on AI 'products', but there may be issues with copyright as apparently you cannot (yet?) copyright anything AI-generated.

AI-assisted writing is another game altogether. Some writers I see online claim to have used AI to 'edit' or 'tidy up' or other cover-up for not actually writing stuff themselves. Where do we draw the line? And how do we even know? I guess if you use AI to write, you run the risk of accusations of plagiarism, since AI text is the very definition of plagiarism and a machine trained on content is surely likely to regurgitate the same content? It's all very new and uncertain.

And why is it that AI art seems incapable of giving people 5 fingers and toes and sometimes even inserts an extra leg or two? 

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