Everything, Everything

There's been a lot of high profile coverage recently around ChatGPT, and rightly so. It's another significant jump in the world of AI. Friends have used it to create a synopsis of a Doctor Who Christmas special, and someone else online created a short book for children. There seems to be genuine fears that human writers will be replaced with AI generated stories. Understandable, when you look at some online content (sometimes I read articles that look like they were generated by an AI based on trending tweets).

Perhaps because I'm writing my own time travel novel, I was reminded of the phrase "Dey tuk er jerbs!" from the South Park episode Goobacks, where time-traveling immigrants come from the year 3045 to find work.

I love AI when it does things well, but it's still imperfect. There are glitches in games that use AI for better framerates. Fingers seem to be an issue for AI image generation. Suggested configuration settings in software may break things. And while you might be able to chain together something like ChatGPT with Sudowrite to try and create a short story, I think you'll struggle to write a good novella, nevermind a good novel.

AI generated content is essentially derivative. It's based on what it has seen before. What it thinks other people like because of how it's been trained. If you want something new, innovative, wildly different... AI isn't there. I don't think AI has taken the jobs of great writers. But if you're a bad writer, maybe you should be slightly concerned.