By NOAH PRIDE
Guest Columnist
Recently, there have been a lot of mentions of Artificial intelligence or AI in the news.
AI has made waves in many areas of life such as art, writing, computer coding, etc.
As with all new technologies, concerns about how AI will affect the job market have been rising. Powerful text based AI such as Claude or Chatgpt have made writers in particular feel threatened.
So, will AI fully replace human writers, authors and the like. The answer is probably not. To delve deeper into why, one must understand what exactly is going on under the hood of an AI. The general idea is that these AIs work as text predictions.
They receive the input text, guess what comes next, then output the new text. For instance, if you would put in the statement “The apple is”.
An AI would output the word red. That concept is then taken further into a neural network. A neural network is designed to mimic the human brain.
To do this, any text inputted into the AI is encoded into numbers. The encoded text is then run through something called hidden layers. It’s here where complex math is done.
The end result is that the AI has a list of words that are most likely to come next. Going back to the example with the input “The apple is”, The AI might give red a 50% chance to come next, a 25% chance to green, and a 15% chance to yellow.
The AI will do this for each word until it completes its reply. In its current state, AI can produce some amazing results.
For an example, I asked Chatgpt to write about a girl eating an apple. Here is its reply. “A young girl sat beneath a shady tree, enjoying the crisp afternoon breeze.
With each delicate bite, she savored the sweet juiciness of a red apple, the sunlight catching the sparkle in her eyes as she relished the simple pleasure of the moment.”
It is pretty understandable while some might worry about AI taking over creative endeavors. This however probably won’t happen as AI is only predicating what comes next, it’s not creating a story.
A story written 100% by AI will be very basic and bland. The AI can’t hide information as it’s just predicting what word fits. Twists like Darth Vader being Luke’s father will be very unlikely.
The Characters the AI write will be very basic archetypes with no real journeys or growth. AI in its current form will not take over the writing industry. But AI can still be used as a worthwhile tool. Spell checkers will get better as AI progresses.
AI can also be a great writing tool with a human editing it and offering it new prompts. People who have great ideas but find the task of sitting down to write a book daunting could turn to AI to do most of the heavy lifting.
With the current technology we have, AI will simply be just another tool for authors to use.
