McKenna Dutton
Over Christmas break, I heard about this new AI called ChatGPT. It’s a natural language processing tool driven by AI. To use it, you need only to Google it, create an account, and then make ChatGPT take on the heavy lifting from there. Ask any question from “What should I do today?” to “Write me a 500-word essay” and AI will provide you a written answer. I think I asked ChatGPT to give me book recommendations and as soon as it answered it weirded me out. I immediately logged off the account and hoped to never interact with it again.
Unquestionably, ChatGPT has the potential to change the way writers write. What does it mean for the future of writing?
I started my search by digging into how AI can affect story writing. Not specifically ChatGPT but other software that is used to help students, teachers, or anyone interested in learning how to write. I found an article from April 2023 that was published by the Springer Journal and was authored by four researchers: Xiaoxuan Fang, Davy Ng, Jac Leung, and Samuel Chu.
“…people have encountered various challenges when writing their digital stories. First, people lack creativity and fail to brainstorm story settings (e.g., characters, time, place), themes attempted, and consequences, climax and resolution,” the authors state.
“AI can benefit writers rather than replace them”
Writers know the frustration of staring endlessly at a blank page in search of perfect words. This article argues that this frustration can be minimized with a little help from AI. AI can benefit writers rather than replace them. The once tedious routine of staring at the blank page can now be relieved with an AI co-author.
“Nowadays, many story authoring software, story animation, and storytelling tools are empowered by AI, which helps users generate suggestions to write parts of or even a fully coherent story,” the article continues. “It helps users to produce story settings (e.g., storylines, plots, characters), analyze and generate sentences, and paragraphs, and adapt to writing styles….”
You might not even realize you’re using smaller versions of this kind of AI. Grammarly is a commonly used writing assistant that helps with spelling, and sentence structure, and can even check for plagiarism. And even though the idea of AI seems scary, the authors argue, AI seems to be making a positive outcome for writers.
“Writers can ask the AI to create suggestions or ideas based on specific vocabulary or phrases. We can see that AI has made significant contributions to collaborating with human writers to generate stories…” the authors note.
While the human author and AI co-author can produce great results, there’s something about a human author that an AI system can never fully capture. The human spirit. It’s cheesy, sure (and perhaps an AI co-author could help me alleviate some of that cheese), but the truth is that human readers rely on human writers to help them find solace in words. The swooning feeling of when the two main love interests finally fall for each other, the intrigue of reading any mystery or true crime novel, and the understanding and empathy that comes from reading incredible true stories. AI systems can never connect emotionally with readers like a human author.
What will be the future of writing? I think it will lead to a human author and an AI co-author writing partnership. While there is nothing like the pure emotion a human author can create, most authors would appreciate a little help from AI that can work with the tedious side of writing: the endless spell checks, typos, and sentence structure. The future of writing will be different, but maybe it doesn’t have to be as intimidating as we think.