Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most important experience of my life.ĪI could write a sentence, then. And yet, here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read. I’d often heard the argument that AI could never write quite like a human precisely because it was a disembodied machine. In that last line, GPT-3 made physical the fact of that impossibility, by referring to the hand-my hand-that existed both then and now. My essay was about the impossibility of reconciling the version of myself that had coexisted alongside my sister with the one left behind after she died. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with. We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. In my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in “Ghosts.” At one point in the essay, I wrote about going with my sister to Clarke Beach near our home in the Seattle suburbs, where she wanted her ashes spread after she died. The problem, for me, was that I disagreed. This was probably the easiest anti-AI argument to make: AI could not replace human writers because it was no good at writing. Some readers told me “Ghosts” had convinced them that computers wouldn’t be replacing human writers anytime soon, since the parts I’d written were inarguably better than the AI-generated parts. I knew I wasn’t that-and told the filmmaker and the VC as much-but then what did I think about all this, exactly? I wasn’t as dismissive of AI’s abilities as other people seemed to be, either. I feared I’d become some kind of AI-literature evangelist in people’s eyes. I was contacted by a filmmaker and a venture capitalist wanting to know how artists might use AI. One writer cited it in a hot take with the headline “Rather Than Fear AI, Writers Should Learn to Collaborate With It.” Teachers assigned it in writing classes, then prompted students to produce their own AI collaborations. But I worried that “Ghosts” would be interpreted as my stake in the ground, and that people would use it to make a case for AI-produced literature. I thought I should feel proud, and to an extent I did. This thread, it seemed to me, had to do with what people were and weren’t capable of articulating on their own.Īrtificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most important experience of my life. It would have to draw attention to the emotional thread that AI companies might pull on when they start selling us these technologies. I was starting to feel, though, that if I did publish an AI-assisted piece of writing, it would have to be, explicitly or implicitly, about what it means for AI to write. But when I sent it to editors, explaining the role of AI in its construction, they rejected it, alluding to the weirdness of publishing a piece written partly by a machine. To my surprise, the story was good, with a haunting AI-produced climax that I never would have imagined. The result was a story about a mom and her son hanging out at a playground after the death of the son’s playmate. I wrote more, and when I got stuck, tapped again. I typed a bit, tapped a button, and GPT-3 generated the next few lines. OpenAI agreed to let me try out GPT-3, and I started with fiction.
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