The focus of my post will be on the use of AI in creative work. There are issues in other areas of AI application that I won’t get into.
AI Has No Emotion or Motivation
“Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Um, of course he's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether he has real feelings is something I don't think anyone can truthfully answer.” Dave Bowman talking about HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Having watched the movie about 30 or 40 times, I think it is meant to be a question that is asked but not answered, but one that the audience is meant to ponder. Does HAL really have emotion, or are his actions just a flaw in his programming?
We have the same question about the real-world AIs we have today. Based on my reading and experience so far, I don’t think current AIs have either emotions or motivation. Maybe someday they will.
In many applications of AI, emotions and motivations are not important. But, when we call on AIs to be creative, emotions and motivations are critical.
In my own experience, and in the opinions I’ve heard from other people, stories written by AIs tend to be bland. They tend toward clichés and lack emotion. That sort of thing is OK in some contexts, like business or technical writing, but it just doesn’t work in creative writing.
Writers, and other creative people are driven to create. No one needs to prompt them. They pour their emotions into their work. That is what makes the art they create interesting to other people.
None of the existing AIs can be described as self-starters. They only react when prompted. They are not motivated to do anything. Left to themselves, they would do nothing. AIs do not want anything. They have no desires.
Homogenization of Content
I came across this idea several times. AIs that generate writing are based on the likelihood that a given word would be followed by another word. This results in writing that hews toward the most common expression. As noted by some, AIs are cliché machines. They don’t go for the unusual, they go for the common.
The trend for the future is toward more homogenized writing. As more of the writing available for training AIs is created by other AIs, less common expressions will be driven out of use. Bland writing from AIs will become blander.
False Hopes for an Easy Writing Career
I’ve seen several articles and YouTube videos claiming that you can be a successful writer using AIs.
I suspect that is unrealistic.
Mostly it is because few writers are successful. The average traditionally published book may only have 3,000 in total sales. With some books selling millions, that means that most books will sell much less than 3,000 copies. Self-published books average only 250 in total sales. (see: https://scribemedia.com/book-sales/)
In my own case, the book I published sold three copies and I made $2.87. It is still for sale if you’d like to bump up my sales to four copies. https://www.lulu.com/shop/james-morison/walk-in-the-snow-a-collection-of-stories-and-articles/ebook/product-1m4ermrp.html
Aside from the low returns on publishing in general, I doubt that many people would want to buy an AI generated book. Nowadays, anyone who wants to, can generate their own AI story, so why pay for someone else’s AI story.
I think that people may well want to generate AI stories, not to sell, but to read themselves. It is already possible to have AI generate a story to your personal specification. You can have a novel where you are the hero.
I haven’t gone to that extent myself, but I have used ChatGPT to create short stories for my own entertainment. I expect that I am not the only one who has done this. While I did get some enjoyment from this, the experience didn’t give me much encouragement about the future of creative writing with AI.
Wrestling with AI
When I experimented with systems like ChatGPT, I find myself fighting with the system to get it to write what I want. In the end, I go back to just writing it myself. If you have something you want to say, or want to say something in a specific way, working with large language models can be very frustrating.
I’m not sure that this limitation will go away any time soon. It may not be a problem if you do not care what is generated, but that isn’t something that happens often.
AI Generated Voices
Many text to voice systems have been used to create audiobooks and YouTube videos. These have the same problem of blandness and lack of emotion as AI writing systems. The reaction to these is often quite negative.
I have used text to voice systems myself in some of my projects. While I have tried some tricks to give the voices a little more character, I still had negative feedback from people. While these voices have improved, they still have that same lack of emotion and blandness that pales compared to the humanity of real actors.
If You Want to be a Writer, Why Would You Use AI?
“I write for the same reason I breathe …
because if I didn’t, I would die.” - Isaac Asimov
I read another comment from Isaac Asimov that if you want to be a writer you must enjoy the act of writing. He went on to emphasis that he meant sitting at the keyboard and bleeding your ideas onto paper. (note: this was from the pre home computer days).
I write, and do the other creative activities I do, because I want to do them. Using AI to write stories for me would be like sending an AI assistant to watch a movie I want to see.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
