Will AI replace humans as authors?
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

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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.