Writing with AI

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AI Literary Collaboration

Familiar Innovations that changed human life include wheels and sails for transport, the multifaceted industrial revolution in material goods production, photography for image production, and many others. AI will have at least as great an influence and it will have it this year.

A friend who is a graphic artist began experimenting with AI in October, 2022. Last week we talked about the ease and speed of producing short storys using Open AI’s ChatGPT. The next day, she sent me some stories made with ChatGPT’s most basic writing options. The stories include humor, sarcasm, and intrigue. They are not terrible and can be improved with ease.

A million users signed up for OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the first five days after release November 30, 2022. There will be at least 100 million more by the end of 2023. My friend’s venture into AI-produced literature from start to finish occurred in a single day. If stories written in a few seconds are too coarse for publication, there are AI editors that can fix the flaws in a few seconds more. I saw a YouTube video that explains how to write one or more books per day, including formatting, publication, and marketing. These are short books, booklets of 10,000 or 15,000 words really. A few days would be required to write a 50,000-word book. As a last step, other AI Bots can alter style to disguise the AI origin. All the millions of new ChatGPT users can instantly become productive writers, and we can expect many will.

Play this short YouTube video by Ryan Reynolds for a marketing/sales example. So surprising I had to play it twice.

“The pace of acceleration is so incredible that these tools – which are shocking and awing us at the beginning of 2023 – are going to seem quite quaint by the end of the year because the capabilities are just going to increase so powerfully”—Nina Schick.

The AI revolution will bring changes to most human endeavors. Wearable AI is available now, and implants are coming. Implants requiring us to plug in periodically for recharge and update might seem utterly unacceptable, but marketers are confident early adopters among young people will be sufficient to support the enterprise.

Here’s some language Open AI recommends: “The author generated this text in part with GPT-x, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed, edited, and revised the language to their own liking and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.”

References and Resources

Applications and examples are exploding. Here are an extremely limited set of useful sources. More are appearing hourly.

AI Websites and Tools:

https://prompthero.com/                         Prompt generation and results.
https://promptbase.com/                         Sell your prompts.
https://www.blaze.tech/                          No-Code platform for building web apps & tools.
https://www.inbenta.com/en/                AI Chatbots for specific industries

Brett Malinowski describes the following tools:

https://tweethunter.io/              Find tweets and generate responses.
https://merlin.foyer.work/         Chrome ext. Command G opens ChatGPT on any site.
https://godinabox.co/                 What’s App — Create responses to chat comments.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/jeffist…         Youtube transcriber
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de…    Web chat GPT

Last Words

Will human-produced literature survive? Painting survived photography, but AI alternatives such as DALL-E-2 will surely reduce human artists’ market share. We will have to wait and see how well new human-produced writing survives. The wait won’t be long.

This blog post was written without AI assistance.

5 thoughts on “Writing with AI”

  1. Dear Garry,

    Thank you for discussing the benefits and future trends of writing with AI so commendably. Well done!

    As an academic researcher, free thinker, writer, artist, musician, composer and so on, I have great concerns about the ramifications and oversights of AI such as ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) becoming mainstream. In particular, Wikipedia has listed the following:

    Negative reactions

    In a December 2022 opinion piece, economist Paul Krugman wrote that ChatGPT would affect the demand for knowledge workers.[40] The Verge’s James Vincent saw the viral success of ChatGPT as evidence that artificial intelligence had gone mainstream.[5] Journalists have commented on ChatGPT’s tendency to “hallucinate”.[41] Mike Pearl of Mashable tested ChatGPT with multiple questions. In one example, he asked ChatGPT for “the largest country in Central America that isn’t Mexico”. ChatGPT responded with Guatemala, when the answer is instead Nicaragua.[42] When CNBC asked ChatGPT for the lyrics to “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”, ChatGPT supplied invented lyrics rather than the actual lyrics.[24] Researchers cited by The Verge compared ChatGPT to a “stochastic parrot”,[43] as did Professor Anton Van Den Hengel of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.[44]

    In December 2022, the question and answer website Stack Overflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of ChatGPT’s responses.[2] In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers.[45]

    Economist Tyler Cowen expressed concerns regarding its effects on democracy, citing the ability of one to write automated comments to affect the decision process of new regulations.[46] The Guardian questioned whether any content found on the Internet after ChatGPT’s release “can be truly trusted” and called for government regulation.[47]

    Implications for cybersecurity

    Check Point Research and others noted that ChatGPT was capable of writing phishing emails and malware, especially when combined with OpenAI Codex.[48] The CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Sam Altman, wrote that advancing software could pose “(for example) a huge cybersecurity risk” and also continued to predict “we could get to real AGI (artificial general intelligence) in the next decade, so we have to take the risk of that extremely seriously”. Altman argued that, while ChatGPT is “obviously not close to AGI”, one should “trust the exponential. Flat looking backwards, vertical looking forwards.”[8]

    Implications for education

    In The Atlantic magazine, Stephen Marche noted that its effect on academia and especially application essays is yet to be understood.[49] California high school teacher and author Daniel Herman wrote that ChatGPT would usher in “The End of High School English”.[50]

    In the Nature journal, Chris Stokel-Walker pointed out that teachers should be concerned about students using ChatGPT to outsource their writing but that education providers will adapt to enhance critical thinking or reasoning.[51]

    Emma Bowman with NPR wrote of the danger of students plagiarizing through an AI tool that may output biased or nonsensical text with an authoritative tone: “There are still many cases where you ask it a question and it’ll give you a very impressive-sounding answer that’s just dead wrong.”[52]

    Joanna Stern with The Wall Street Journal described cheating in American high school English with the tool by submitting a generated essay.[53] Professor Darren Hick of Furman University described noticing ChatGPT’s “style” in a paper submitted by a student. An online GPT detector claimed the paper was 99.9% likely to be computer-generated, but Hick had no hard proof. However, the student in question confessed to using GPT when confronted, and as a consequence failed the course.[54] Hick suggested a policy of giving an ad-hoc individual oral exam on the paper topic if a student is strongly suspected of submitting an AI-generated paper.[55] Edward Tian, a senior undergraduate student at Princeton University, claimed that he has created a program, named “GPTZero,” that detects whether an essay is human written or not to combat academic plagiarism.[56][57]

    As of January 4, 2023, the New York City Department of Education has restricted access to ChatGPT from its public school internet and devices.[58][59]

    As far as I am concerned, blurring authorship aside, the validity and reliability of ChatGPT (and for that matter, other AI variants, intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA)) as well as the extent to which AI can or should be used or coopted as a research tool, educational tool, authoring tool and/or expert system remain areas requiring urgent attentions and holistic solutions.

    Finally, Happy New Year to you!

    Yours sincerely,
    SoundEagle

    Liked by 2 people

  2. The concerns seem valid. Some of them are just sad–the cat’s out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube. Another concern is for the further debasement of human intellect. Consequences of our actions already surpass our comprehension. Will we just sigh with relief thinking is no longer required? But perhaps AI can help correct our failures. Why can’t we be good socialists? Chat what can we do to improve? But do we care? Christians are telling lies and seeking power.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. A friend asked what we do about ChatGPT’s inaccuracy. Simple: We have to apply critical thinking techniques to AI statements just as we do to human statements. Moreover, we can limit AI inaccuracies by asking for accuracy in our prompts and by requiring proof such as reference to peer-reviewed publications.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. Dear Garry,

    I concur with you and would like to inform you that at the end of the section titled “Fact-Checking : An Emerging Market Fraught with Issues” in my post entitled “Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity“, I have discussed in detail the issues and problems of automations and technologies with respect to expert systems and artificial intelligence as championed in technoutopianism. You are invited to read and comment on the section as I would love to know what you will make of it. The direct link is:

    https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2020/12/19/misquotation-pandemic-and-disinformation-polemic-mind-pollution-by-viral-falsity/#Fact_Checking

    Yours sincerely,
    SoundEagle

    Liked by 2 people

  5. Dear Garry,

    I have just replied to you by submitting a comment here, and the comment seems to have disappeared. If the comment has been mistakenly identified as spam, please kindly retrieve and approve it from your WordPress spam folder. The said comment begins with “I concur with you and would like to inform you that at the end of the section titled “Fact-Checking : An Emerging Market Fraught with Issues“.

    To access your WordPress spam folder, go to the following URL:

    [insert your blog url here]/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=spam

    After unspamming the comment, you will need to approve it by going to the following URL:

    [insert your blog url here]/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=all

    Thank you.

    Yours sincerely,
    SoundEagle

    Liked by 2 people

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