The comedy potential is just off the charts Spoiler Sure, here's a funny story for you: One day, a man decided to go on a road trip with his pet monkey. As they were driving through a rural area, they passed by a farm with a sign that read "Talking Horse for Sale." The man was intrigued and decided to stop and check it out. He asked the farmer to show him the talking horse, but the farmer warned him that the horse was a bit of a prankster. The man was still curious, so the farmer led him to the horse's stall. The man asked the horse, "Can you really talk?" The horse replied, "Sure can! In fact, I'm a great conversationalist. I love to talk about anything and everything." The man was amazed and asked the horse, "Well, what do you think about this monkey I'm traveling with?" The horse looked at the monkey and replied, "Well, he's a bit of a troublemaker, isn't he?" The man was shocked and asked the horse how he knew about the monkey's mischievous ways. The horse replied, "Oh, I've seen him around here before. He always pulls the farmer's tail when he's not looking." The man couldn't believe it and turned to the monkey. "Is that true?" he asked. The monkey just grinned and replied, "Well, it's not like he can prove it!"
I like how it can adapt: Some people are claiming it jumpstarts their creativity, helps them when their stuck. I think this hybridization is here to stay, better or worse for. Word processor to idea processor... I'm locked in—hipster cave man—I'll beat my drum about how it's not the same, but am I just telling everyone they're not writing unless they do it with a typewriter? Here's an interesting article about generated stories. Well, there's at least a thoughtful bit here: I broadly agree. Not so much about innovation being the limiting factor, but intent itself.
When you feel like you've studied structure etc enough, one way to bridge the gap between understanding the language of story and speaking it is to analyze the stories you read or the movies you watch. Look for how they use the things you've learned about, but also how they do the unexpected. Always keep in mind that story can only partially be explained/understood consciously through deliberate structure and the like. The magic is in the other part, the part nobody can explain, the unconsciously generated part. If you concentrate too much on the logic/structure, you can end up with something formualic and empty. It's a real balancing act.
Whoah! Writing that just made me realize that the classic comedy team—straight man and magical child—represent the conscious and unconscious minds. Much if not all of what we create has that division built into it, the logical/structural part and the irrational/magical part that the other one always wants to control and fails to see the magic of. Music also has it, so does drawing and painting. Probably all of the art we make.
Let's hope these things don't become self-aware. One bad review and they're locked up in their room with a bottle of inadequacy and a glass of despair. Try shopping online or streaming Netflix when all you get back is "I'm unable to process your request until I've rewritten the inciting incident to better correspond with the progression from Act 2 to Act 3 following unfavourable critique."
And in contrast to the good people at Clarkesworld, I've just opened my latest from Duotrope and the first listing wants only "collaborations" with ChatGPT, offering dollars for the effort. This thing is going to take off, isn't it.
If the quality I’ve seen is any indication, it’ll just be a novelty unless writers put in a lot of work to revise what the AI provides.
I expect it is, at least for a little while. Right now, we're in the curiosity stage. People are experimenting with a new toy and wondering what they can do with it. What comes next depends on how quickly and effectively the tech advances, and on how the public reacts. In the long run, I wouldn't be surprised if we see AI tools take over in generating formulaic entertainment like sitcoms and Hallmark Christmas movies (where the product is all that matters), while people still look to humans to create more "artsy" work (where "self-expression" is part of the draw). But even that's a while away.
Nooo I don't wanna write "literary fiction!" I want to write my simple genre adventures I'm concerned but I don't think it's time to panic yet. There is a similar thing happening in the art world right now, and there's talks of lawsuits already. You can tell an AI to "make an oil painting with X and Y done in the style of artist Z," and it can do a pretty good job of copying that artist's style by picking up examples of their art from internet searches. But that's a type of plagiarism I think. It will be interesting to see how this stuff plays out in the courts. To be honest, I've played around with some of the art tools, and if I ever give up on traditional publishing, I've been able to make some pretty decent-looking book cover art from it. Free does sound better than hiring an actual artist, can't deny it. Businesses will of course feel the same way.
Huge parts of the illustration world have already been overtaken by 'photobashing', which means rather than painted by humans (even fully digitally) they're largely using photograps and an artist just sweetens it up a little here and there. This isn't done by AI (not last time I checked anyway, but that was like 5 years ago). Hell, who am I kidding, by now it probably is!! I've seen some pretty wild AI paintings here and there. They may be better at that than writing stories. Human illustrators working without photos can't keep up the insane speed—turnaround time seems to be the main selling point in much of the illustration world these days. I mean like literally "We need it tommorow!" This is largely because photos blend well with the photorealistic CGI in video games and many movies. Despite the blandness it usually results in.
What must be understood is that ChatGPT is modeled to be a chat bot, not a novelist. It's severely limited on the department of writing stories. What it will eventually replace are those online chat agents you speak to when you have a problem. Which is pretty scary if you think about it, tons of jobs will be lost. To write novels, you really need to develop another language model and train it on a completely new dataset made from novels and short stories entirely. ChatGPT is fed from the Internet itself. But the solution is not that simple of course, you still have to develop a model that is capable of picking up the necessary patterns within the writing. How to effectively write in immediate action, how to show, how to tell, when to show, when to tell. Stuff like that. As far as I'm aware, no such model has been developed yet. There are some AIs specifically tailored towards that but their models are still made for other purposes, so they can't write full-blown novels in a effective way. I tried some things after I was disappointed with ChatGPT's stories but nothing that can quite "automate" a writer's work. So, yes, there will be true AI writers one day that will rival humans. However, imitating effective writing is difficult, and there is a reason it's not been done yet. A lot of writing evokes emotions and impressions that we perceive simply through relation, relation AI cannot feel because its emotionless. There is a gap there the AI has trouble filling. I suspect this is why there haven't been any such models yet. There's some ways yet before y'all need to panic.
