Will AI replace humans as authors?

People are using ChatGPT to write everything from poetry to entire books. 

So far it seems like it’s doing it very well and ridiculously fast.  I want to talk about what this means for the future of writing.

Related article – https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/artificial-intelligence-ai-destroy-writing-chatgpt/

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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is with the latest developments tool Chat GPT from OpenAI, how I think AI may ultimately replace humans as authors.

So my friends and I have been spending quite a bit of time with Chat GPT and in particular from my perspective, I’m most interested in the unique use cases people are coming up with in terms of how to leverage this technology to generate value. And I’m using that for the most part to create content, content like this so I can share what I’m learning with you so that it helps you figure out how to make your products better.

But of all the other folks in my network, they’re using it for different reasons as well too. And I wanted to learn more about that. So I have a bunch of content that I want to produce, right, and that includes email courses, ebooks, even books and things like that about this type of content specifically and all the various other subjects that I usually cover.

Now, one of the biggest bottlenecks to doing that is it’s time consuming. It takes quite a bit of time for me to have to sit down, plan it out, create outlines and then ultimately write everything, proofread it, get the grammar correct, which is definitely not a strength of mine.

I’m an engineer by trade, which means for the most part I can’t spell in almost any language. But as I’m learning about some of these other use cases and what folks have been using it for, I’m hearing everything from people are writing remarkable poetry that’s indistinguishable from some of the greatest artists all the way to and through.

People are leveraging it to create entire books for which they may have already been publishing on Amazon of different categories and things like that.

So that really sent me down a rabbit hole of figuring out and really asking the question what is an author? Because where this came from was when I was speaking with some of my colleagues, I was trying to figure out for what Chat GPT has been producing in terms of the questions we ask and the help that we want, the information we’re trying to gain access to.

When it’s asked sometimes for sources, that’s kind of the question that came up is like when you’re asking it to cite where it’s got that information from.

Because I know attribution is a big thing that a lot of people in particular authors are concerned about and in some instances, in terms of at least from what I’ve heard, I still need to do more testing.

Sometimes it will list the sources, but sometimes it’s pulling it from so many different locations that sometimes I think there’s a little bit of pushback there.

So this part is at least unclear.

But that made me think about yet another question in terms of, well, what makes an author?

What would the difference be in terms of what a human may be doing versus what the AI may be doing?

Because as I started to think about it, I was thinking that I think the AI or the tech is essentially following the same, if not a similar process as a human would, but just at a remarkably faster and more efficient pace. It can be more effective as well too, because you can apply different types of rules like grammar and spelling and all that kind of stuff in order to make sure that it’s essentially as perfect as it’s going to be and you can introduce different styles and all kinds of things like that. So anyway, that’s the question that I’m posing here.

I want to dive into some detail from an article that I read which really painted a very particular picture about what the future of writing looks like with the advent of this technology.

Now, from one of the enlightening articles that I found, which paints somewhat of a gloomy picture here in terms of what the future looks like for authors, it makes two specific key points which I think are very relevant in this context.

And that’s the fact that, number one, the prediction from this writer with decades of experience is that writing is essentially over and that authors should drop it or switch almost entirely because rather soon the computers will be here too.

And their words quote, do it better, which I can understand and has kind of been the plot for a ton of sci-fi movies for decades at this point.

And the second, which is even more interesting to me because I’m not sure I completely, 100% agree and I want to talk about what I mean by that, but I do see where they’re coming from, is that if you break writing down to a formula, so to speak, it essentially is an algorithm.

And this is where I would agree with this author as well too.

Is that’s kind of where I was when I was thinking through citing sources and pulling information from where?

And is AI essentially an author?

Can it become an author like chat GPT?

What’s the difference between Chat GPT writing something and me writing something?

Chances are we’re going through a similar process. We’re going to do research, we’re going to create outlines, that type of thing. The difference is the technology is doing it ridiculously faster than I am.

So that’s really what it broke down to for me. It’s pulling information from different sources. It’s arguably learning. Like when I was going to school a million years ago, what they would talk to you about is you needed to paraphrase, you couldn’t just plagiarize and all this other type of stuff. You got to cite your sources and whatnot.

And I understand all of that, but the thing that always was questionable for me was like, well, what’s the difference between me just reading and learning and kind of like paraphrasing, so to speak, versus taking that information and sharing it.

It seemed very similar to me. So to me there appeared to be quite a bit of gray area.

So if you look at it at a fundamental level in terms of what writing is, I would 100% completely agree that it’s an algorithm and the process that’s followed by humans probably very similar to these language models like Chad GPT.

As such, the results that are produced probably are of equal, if not greater quality and done remarkably faster and more efficiently than a human who could ever do it.

So that brings me to the next question, which is, if that’s the case, then what does the future of writing actually look like?

So as I asked myself this question and started doing research down another rabbit hole here in terms of what does the future of writing look like, I realized that ultimately what it really boils down into is will writers in the current format in which they exist essentially survive? And that was a more difficult question to answer. But I would still fall back on what has largely been the case when any new revolutionary technology has made its way to the open market, in that it doesn’t essentially necessarily eliminate everything the way that we did it before. It usually just changes it.

As in if you want to prepare yourself as best as possible for surviving or remaining doing the work that you love or the way that you do it, the chances are you need to get comfortable with it evolving in terms of you figuring out how to leverage the technology to do significantly better than you did before.

As that leap forwarded, technology makes things that previously were not possible, possible. You need to figure out how to become trained and educated on it so that you can leverage it in order to reach a different level of performance than before was ever possible without that technology.