I reckon we all have read the news, seen all the various media and online reports, about the advances in AI technology. When it comes to writers, editors and proofreaders in whatever industry, will our creative writing be overtaken by AI and similar technology? In, maybe 10 years' time, will us writers become antiquated, defunct, even - will we all become of a bygone age?
I hope not. Right now AI can't do what a human writer can. However, it is not impossible that given enough time and development, they might outperform us.
If AI models that can write accurate articles both from an information and grammatical stand-point ever become a thing, then yes. It will likely hurt freelancers as people will just spit out a prompt and be met with a professional grade article. But that's in a perfect world. ChatGPT is impressive but it actually really sucks in a lot of ways when it comes to writing. It makes grammar errors, the content it creates has a certain structural pattern to it, and the accuracy of its information is disappointingly low. From both a writing and editorial stand-point, it is completely unusable... unless you edit what it outputs and give it thorough checks. You can't trust ChatGPT to do anything completely right on its own. Ever. And I'm not saying that out of bias, it really is unreliable. One potential use I found for it was deeper grammar checks. Most grammar checkers out there perform them in an algorithmic way that has many limits. I thought that ChatGPT would be more powerful as its more than an algorithm, but all I found was that it made tons of mistakes. And worse, it kept presenting them as if they were right. There will be a long way before AI becomes perfect. It likely won't ever be as reliable as a human. It will only be suitable for use-cases where quality doesn't matter as much.
All the stories I've seen wrtten by ChatGPT are terrible far various reason I've explained on previous threads about this topic. But Sudowrite is very different. It doesn't write, it assists writers, and seems like a very good use for AI in writing. Hopefully that's the main way AI will go in writing, but most likely they'll keep improving on their abiity to actually write as well. I think if humans want to be competitive with AI they'll need to write with some personality and flair—things AI probably won't be able to imitate well like humor. Though who knows, it may be able to do passavly well even at that one day.
Haven't played with it much myself but it does have some application, it seems, as a writing assistant. For example, if you are stuck on a describing a particular scene, you can ask it to describe your setting...say, a 15th century inn, and it will give you some clues. You don't necessarily have to use them verbatim but they can mentally stimulate you in the direction you want to go.
The way I hope this plays out is like how the advent of computers changed accounting and calculators (which of course used to be people, who calculated). We've not seen human accounting or maths disappear. Instead, it has changed and is much more about interfacing with computers. A modern accountant rarely does much maths on paper but is a wizz with Excel. Advantage is that one accountant is much, much more productive. This is great because it makes us all richer and is the main way our economy has been progressing since the stone age. It does however mean that people have to change and retrain, and where there were many jobs as a calculator, book keeper or accountant - there are now far fewer. So my hope is that human writing will still be a thing, and of course will always exist as a hobby. However, I expect professions which involve writing (journalism, authors, script writers) will be much more about using computers and reviewing the output.
ChatGPT has a long way to go from feedback I've heard and some little personal experience I've had. It needs a lot of work to get going but could be the start of something bigger.
At the worst I can see it causing the stagnation of human creativity. At the best I see it benefiting those who don't care.
AI is huge game changer, I honestly would not be surprised if we saw it reaching advanced levels of writing within a year or two from now. I think there are many opportunities for writer's to take advantage of though utilizing this technology. Probably more so from a creative standpoint, but it could be applied to any type of writing. It would be awesome if you could feed an AI a data set of locations, items, and people from your fantasy novel and have it generate a wiki which allows the reader to go to a website which hosts your story. While reading the story if you reference a specific item from your world the reader might be confused about they could click a link to an article which explains the item more in-depth if they need a refresher. I mean there's really many different possibilities. With text to video you could even have AI generate your story instantly as a movie, maybe have a website that lets the reader toggle between the text and video versions of it. It may take away from the writing experience, but I think it also opens the door to other possibilities. You just have to think outside the box.
