The future is Automatic. George knew.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the purple button to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

Have you played with AI in your writing? Tell us what you think about it.

No, I haven’t and the short answer is that I have no desire to.

As for my opinion, I think that it’s important to remember that George Orwell predicted the use of “machines” to write both news and fiction for the masses in his dystopian novel, 1984. He portrayed it as a way of producing high-volume/low-quality entertainment to promote a message and keep the people happy. In his world, everything was constantly being rewritten to fit the desired narrative.

Not that I’m suggesting for one moment the same thing could be happening now, with the aid of AI.

As for what I think about it, while I recognise its usefulness in many fields, I can’t help thinking that its whole creative aspect is based on harvesting data from other creatives and then rehashing it. Now, in a scientific context, that’s no bad thing.

AI’s ability to look at everything that has ever been recorded, cross reference and connect seemingly unrelated information at high speed has the potential to change things like medicine and engineering radically.

However, as all the AI-created fiction is based on an analysis of everyone else’s writing, there’s no spark of originality in most of the product that I’ve seen. There’s none of the quirky, independent thought that comes from an expert storyteller. And none of the emotion, empathy or depth. It’s all very stilted and formulaic.

If we’re not careful, AI could soon be learning from AI-generated work, leading to a self-perpetuating spiral of regurgitated content.

Which is not to say that it won’t get better, and quickly, as the technology develops.

I suspect that my work, whether it’s novels, short stories, blog posts or any other scribblings has already been sampled and used in the creation of AI-generated text. I expect I “gave” permission on page 197 of the agreement I electronically signed, after reading it all.

As a method of producing new content, reading and learning from the work of others is not automatically a bad thing, it’s how inspiration often works in the real world. There are so many ways of combining words to make a story.

What bothers me more is the way that I suspect the AI content will be marketed, either without admitting it’s AI-generated or that it’s somehow better because it is.

Both of these are potentially bad news in their own way. This also raises the concern that a lot of fake news and propaganda could be generated in a very short time by AI, flooding the world of media with opinions and “facts,” based not on truth but on someone’s agenda.

If it isn’t happening already. Now that is something that Orwell would recognise. And it’s also a potential starting place for a whole new genre of fiction, which, hopefully, will be written by real people.

Until next time.

Let me know what you think about this week’s subject.

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