AI and Creative Writing
A friend introduced me to ChatGPT a while back and suggested it could help me plot and write my fiction. He meant well, but despite my astonishment at what the AI app can do, I found it ominous.
The foundation of all creative endeavors, including writing, is the exercising of the boundless human imagination and studied skills to inform, entertain (hopefully both), and influence others emotionally or philosophically, ultimately for the public benefit.
Our technology has gained the ability to access all the world's recorded knowledge of history and data and current facts and commentary on any subject. Just ask Siri or Alexa anything and you'll instantly get helpful info. They'll even play your favorite music for you. The tech is already ostensibly more intelligent than any human can hope to be in several ways. It is self-learning and gaining refinement rapidly. Exponentially. Some people are concerned it could become so intelligent it no longer needs fragile and fallible humans to feed it. That it might even develop what might be considered a level of consciousness.
Editors and publishers are already warning writers they won't accept work generated or assisted by AI. You must swear you haven't employed it if you want to be published on Amazon, which is a bit ironic because Amazon has recently itself employed AI to narrate audio books. I've added their audio formats to seven of my novels, which were already available in print and Kindle. Amazon gives you a choice of narrative voice from a generous selection. A few clicks and a whole book is magically converted to audio format in minutes. You even have the option to then go in and insert or modify any dramatic pauses in the narration, which is already remarkably realistic, even seeming to charge passages with something like emotion.
After nearly half a century writing articles and short stories for magazines, learning a lot along that fascinating path, I spent 18 months researching and writing a series debut novel, GUNS, set on North Carolina's Outer Banks and in the Great Smokies, locations I'd long been familiar with. I had a friend who'd served in naval intelligence and knew a lot about the world trade in black market weapons, so that became the story background. For many years I was a light plane pilot with my own Cessna Skyhawk I'd named Angel, so the story protagonist, Sam Bass, was also a pilot. I created an elderly couple, Hank and Hattie, modeled after my maternal grandparents. My companion, Naomi, is part Cherokee, so that ancient and noble mountain culture figured prominently throughout the plot.
The point is, I was able to infuse the story with genuine authenticity and emotion because it was based largely on my personal life experiences backed up with thoughtful research. The novel drew an advance from a traditional publisher, nice reviews from Publishers Weekly and other respected sources, and an endorsement from top international bestselling author Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher series. GUNS sold out two printings and still earns modestly well on Amazon along with three other subsequent novels in the series.
Could AI have done a better job? I don't think so. AI could not have described to readers what it's like to contend with the challenges of piloting, or what it feels like to crank up a Skyhawk's engine, taxi across a rural airport, aim her down a runway, firewall the throttle, sense the yoke coming alive under your hands, and experience the shot of euphoria as the wheels leave the pavement and you cease to be a land dweller and become a creature of the vast ephemeral sky.
AI will certainly impress us with its increasing apparent cleverness and unlimited wealth of helpful knowledge.
But it will never have a human soul.
Phil
website: www.philbowie.com
