ChatGPT is really making waves. It’s so bad Bing seems poised to make a comeback.
AI has been writing weather reports and sports stories for years, but AI is making bold strides into creativity, something long thought off limits to it.
So, shall your Kindle feed finally be satiated? No more waiting until winter arrives for the next book in your favorite series. You can have an AI generate the next book for you when you are ready.
But you will quickly grow disappointed in this land of plenty.
If you train an AI on the entire corpus of Urban Fantasy, something will happen. It will pump out UF after UF novel. But they will all be derivative. All the things that appear so much in the genre that they have become a trope will be out in full force. And all the little touches that authors make to distinguish themselves will be smoothed over.
You will be left with an experience that will feel like UF. You won’t be able quite to place it. It will somehow check all the boxes and still leave you feeling unfulfilled.
And then, when you read the next book cranked out, even though the words will be all different, the experience will somehow be exactly the same.
You can add some random heat, but at this time, all that typically makes is some gibberish spicing up the bland fare. You can also try mixing in varying amounts of other genres to see what sort of fusions develop, but this, I suspect, will be more miss than hit.
Also, a final thought. I speak for many readers when I say I would love another Terry Pratchett novel. And I bet you, if I fed a generator his entire Discworld series, I would be able to have one. Hell, Cohen, the Barbarian is canonically dead, but now he can be resurrected for more comic geriatric rabble-rousing. Fun!
But the thing I loved about Sir Pratchett is watching his writing grow over the years. The incisive humor grew far more subtle, and his empathy grew and made me think about others, not like me.
If we cram all that into the sausage press, it will probably be a tasty, if vaguely familiar, Discworld affair. But I won’t get the next step in his growth arc. Perhaps an aspiring computer scientist can look into the next generation of generative algorithms that can maybe chart a time course through one’s writings and then make the next extrapolation. But algorithms generally fall apart at extrapolation, especially N-dimensional ones like GPT3.
I’ll leave you with Randall Munroe, mourning Terry Pratchett’s death.
0 Comments