Could an AI do this?

Long before AI was a thing I’d be saying to people, “I could tell you everything that happens in the novel I’ve spent five years writing. I could explain each scene. I’ll even give you some of the dialogue I used. But even with all that you’d never be able to write the same novel.” It’s no surprise then that I don’t think an Artificial Intelligence could either. 

Although I’m primarily writing about AI as it relates to writing and creativity, I am obviously not going to be able to avoid all temptation to meander into AI topics not related to writing and being creative. For a start they got the name wrong. It’s not intelligent. It’s just very good at taking data that exists and making something out of it almost instantly but I’m yet to be made aware of any Artificial Intelligence having a single original thought.

I’m going to start with the fun stuff. A quick search comes up with the following definitions (I’ve paraphrased only a little) ... “computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making………that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals………” And as that comes from Google’s “AI Overview,” you can’t help but feel that you’ve basically asked AI what it thinks it is. More accurately, you’ve asked an AI to tell you what others have said about it. Now I’m starting to feel that I’ve asked Google to Google itself about what Google is, according to Google.

By using all the information that is out there, you can ask ChatGPT to write a letter, and it can do it in five seconds and there is something amazing about that. However, I’m not sure we should put absolute faith in getting a letter that isn’t cliché to the point that the reader instantly recognises that you’ve used an AI template, full of daft phrases like, “I am writing to your esteemed establishment because I feel that my career goals align perfectly with the ideals of your company.”

You can write a job application, write an essay for class, write a song, poem, review, marketing plan …………etc. We could go on listing all the things that humans can do. The implications of the first two in that list have made AI synonymous with cheating. Job applications and essays are supposed to be a test of what you can do and not what you can ask an AI to do for you in five seconds flat. Playing Devil’s advocate I ask: Does it matter who wrote your job application? You Okayed what you handed in. You answered questions in an interview about what was in your AI written application. You got the job, in which you rely heavily on AI to do your job for you and maybe you learn a little as you go from your use of AI. AI becomes your mentor in a way. You’ve learned to play the system. It’s not your fault the system was so easily played.

Sadly, the type of person that would ask an AI to write a job application is often the type of person to write, “Dear [Enter name of Company Here] and no one can take you seriously from that moment onward. This is not entirely a new phenomenon. Template letters have been available to download for decades. AI can do it quicker and to order. That’s why I’m not worried about any, “AI will replace us all!” debates. This kind of “cheating” existed before AI and will exist after it. I’m not going to be remotely shocked if I ever find out that many people I’ve worked with have got where they are based on using a template off the internet and bluffing everything from there on. As long as surgeons aren’t blagging it then everything’s good.

For anyone who chooses to still fret over an imagined future where every job is taken by an Artificial Intelligence, it’s worth knowing that Capitalism will not let this happen. Selling overpriced sandwiches to us all on our lunch hours, selling us supermarket meal deals and pricey coffees, will keep us all in employment for as long as there is an economy that needs feeding. The number one rule of a Capitalist society is that you need your people to be gainfully employed to spend money. AI robots just won’t go to Pret A Manger to buy a brie and cranberry baguette like you or I would. It’s a good baguette, and although an algorithm will know that a certain percentage of the human work force will love it, the AI robot workers will never personally reach the same conclusions. That’s AI in a nutshell. It can tell you what millions of people have already said about a sandwich, but it can’t have its own opinion about it. You need employed people to buy whatever you’re selling. Economies thrive on you and I buying something, often something we do not need, on a mad whim. Retail therapy is real. A robot is never going to feel down about life and make an irrational purchase. If the scenario of all fast-food outlets being run by an AI, telling its human underlings which burgers to prepare for customers that are all unemployed and can’t afford a burger, is the absurd future you see before us, then keep worrying about an Artificial Intelligence take over.

I know I’d let myself get sidetracked. There’s too much fun in the whole debate to not get into it. As for the creative side of things, let’s start with three tasks I just set ChatGPT to: 

On being asked to write me an essay on Quinten Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs, it only took five seconds to come up with all the vital information needed to educate anyone about that film.

I did like the results of my asking for a sarcastic review of the film Blade Runner 2049. It hit  on most of the points I’d have done, namely calling the film out on being overly self-indulgent with needless lingering landscape shots and Ryan Gosling staring at nothing in particular for minutes at a time. Remarkably though, ChatGPT never uses the words “overly indulgent,” but it’s the first words that come to mind. I’ll get to that in a moment.

The review of Starbucks on Great Portland Street that I asked for is about as generic as it gets. It’s the highest level of bland marketing copy and could be used to describe a million different coffee shops. I put that down to drawing a million different opinions from a million different online reviews. Hence, there is no one opinion on the matter offered by ChatGPT. AI has no one singular voice. It has no opinion. It only has access to yours, but only if yours matches what a lot of other people have already said. The AI sarcastic review that I ordered up didn’t make any mention of Blade Runner 2049 being overly self-indulgent. I can only guess that that description didn’t recur enough in any algorithm to make it into the review. When you start to think about it, and it has only just come to mind as I’m writing this, AI does inadvertently promote populism. You can ask any AI and it will tell you as much, although it will quibble about what counts as populism. There is no judgement of any of the data, but just by saying that the data comes from an Artificial Intelligence gives us a sense of it being more than a layman’s opinion and it isn’t. It is, although not exclusively and this is based on my rudimentary layman’s point of view, the current common online perception of the data. Does this make it the consensus layman’s opinion? Or it could be a lot of clueless opinion that’s just the opinion that’s shouted the loudest. Chat GPT is very polite about it though. 

With all this fun and games in mind, let’s get back to the initial question. Could an AI do this? Would it come up with a better name than “TheSolidWallOfWriting (AKA: You can’t write like Dostoevsky if you only use Emojis?)” The answer is: Who cares? It’s the wrong question to be asking. More apt is the question of, “Does it matter if an AI could do this?”

For those who say that AI is incapable of creativity because it is incapable of original thought, I’d counter with the ever popular argument that says that there is no original thought anyway. So what if a computer program creates something based on what’s gone before? Arguably that’s what artists do. Once in a while something comes along that is like nothing else. I swear I’ve never heard a sound like Jack White playing the guitar solo and bridge sections on Seven Nation. It’s actually not even the best guitaring he does on the whole album. Ball and a biscuit has some incredible guitar sounds going on, but they’re by no means the same sort of unique sound as Seven Nation army. As a side note to that, for years I’ve been referring to the best part of that song as the guitar riff, that’s the thumping bass like sound and the one that is replicated at sporting events. It’s actually the solo and bridge parts of the song where the unique sound comes in.

I’m not sure there is a formula for that, not one that any AI can come up with. There is a formula though for many other creative ventures. I’d have to say that writing stands out as the most obvious one, and as AI is great with copying what went before, I’m sure it could create a very good website about writing, with a sideline of tempting you to read its journalism and fiction. And would it matter if this was all written by an AI? Ally Chisholm? Sounds like a made-up person to me! AI? Al? Looks the same on the screen to me. You didn’t even notice that one of those was “A” for Artificial and “I” for Intelligence whilst the other was an “A” and an “L,” as in short for Alfred, Alexander, Alexandra, Aloitius or Alasdair. On one level it doesn’t matter who wrote what. There is too much fixation on who an author is anyway. All stories are human, no matter how they are created. If you took Crime and Punishment, American Psycho, Girlfriend in a Coma, Catcher in the Rye and Invisible Monsters into an AI blender I’m sure you’d come up with something. I confess, I looked at my bookshelf for my favourite novels to come up with that recipe for our blender.

Could a non-human AI bot, on its way to Pret to not buy a sandwich from another AI Bot, create a work of art like Tracey Emin’s My Bed? I think that the main thing I remember about it at the time was that people were saying, “Anyone can make a bed look messy and tip loads of rubbish around it and make it look really grotty. That’s not art!” Anyone can do it? An AI bot could do it? True but the artist’s answer should always be, “But you didn’t.” That was Emin’s answer.

Art is choices and making choices is not something an AI can do, no more than a paintbrush can decide what to paint. I’m happy to believe that you can create using AI but the artist will always be the author inputting the creative ideas, and if not that, the author will always be the original creator of the work that is being rehashed, like music being sampled and reshaped into something else. Art can be made from other art. You can piece together a self portrait made of cuttings of the Mona Lisa and the choice to do that is your art. The idea of a self portrait is nothing new. The Mona Lisa is nothing new.

Add to all this the idea that we do care who the artist is. Even if we say a piece of artwork or a song or a story is artificially produced, made in a computer lab, we get excited and ask, “What do you think of this? An AI did it,” and we get excited and say, “Wow, I can’t believe that wasn’t done by a person.” We applaud the art because of who we perceive the artist to be.

Here’s a painting by a child.

Here’s a painting by a chimp.

Here’s a painting by an AI.

And we say, “That kid’s good or that’s not bad for a chimp or wow AI can come up with some great stuff.” Although, it’s not coming up with anything all by itself. It’s copying from similar images that already exist that it can find in a vast database of images previously made by human beings. It’s working on the specification you’ve asked it to use.  Ask it to write you a song and it will be working from a brief you’ve given it. It will most likely sound a bit like something you know because you asked for it to sound that way. You can’t ask for it to come up with a sound no one has heard before. That’s not what it does. It is the great sampler of all things creative.

If you consider the idea of the self-portrait made from cuttings of the Mona Lisa, coming up with the idea is one part of the art, but the effort taken to do it yourself, that’s what garners the most respect. Doing it yourself also allows for happy accidents. Art is full of happy accidents. Above all else, there is a creative process that I don’t believe can be replicated. And of all I’ve had to write on the matter, I do realise that that this seems to be the least concrete of arguments, but I do believe that something happens in the thinking and agonising that comes with creating, that is evident in the final product. There are often seemingly innocuous elements of any work that make it great, sometimes reaching from your subconscious to the page. There are times when you yourself do not understand why you did what you did, said what you said, made the noise that you made, wrote what you wrote.  

There is also something about the experiential nature of any creative work, the relationship between art and the artist and the interpretation by the audience that needs to be taken into account. I think of poor James Frey writing A million little pieces, his memoir of drug addiction, which was well received, until it turns out that it was more fiction than memoir. And his readers turned on him.  Frey’s perceived lack of literary talent could be forgiven if his stories were his true experience. There was an aspect of, “Yeah, a drug addict wrote this. Who cares if it’s not the best writing?” People wanted authenticity. They wanted the author’s genuine pain. Do I believe an AI can give you that? Only maybe if you give it your pain, or it takes someone else’s from previous writing, then you get a product that captures that emotion. Sometimes half the battle is getting the reader to look where you want them to look, to feel what you want them to feel. My sticking point is, from all the joy and pain, bliss and existential angst and everything in-between, in the history of literature from Gilgamesh onward, would an AI choose all the right words and phrases, the ways of conveying emotion? How would it achieve that authenticity without feeling it? Does it need authenticity if it can fake it? That would entirely depend on what brief it was given. Intention is needed. What do you intend this story to be? What do you intend this story to do to its reader? I can’t get past that. I can’t get past that choices have to be made and there has to be a reason for those choices. If you asked an artificial intelligence why it made any choice when creating a narrative, or choosing the words that best express what is being conveyed, surely it can only reply that it’s doing what it’s been instructed to do.

If it were writing this article, how would it do it differently and would it matter? The Gilgamesh reference above was not planned. It felt like a flourish of words ending in literary reference. It just popped into my head. For an AI to hit on the same reference you’d need to prompt it by telling it to make reference to the earliest known written story, and hope it agreed with you on that being The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in 2100 BC in ancient Mesopotamia.

For any AI to produce something people cannot imagine, to truly create, would seem like the birth of a new life form, with new thoughts and new stories. Given the choice would it even tell stories?  In the course of writing this I’ve asked Chat GPT a few questions along the way and had some interesting results. So, I thought I’d ask just one more question, hoping for an enlightening answer. I asked, “If an AI could choose to tell a story what stories would it tell?” The responses I got were ultimately the most human you could ask for, in respect that they read like a list of ideas and theories that people might come up with and post online. It was pure run of the mill conjecture. There was nothing original in anything on the page. Nothing definitive. It was akin to having a few guesses. What leaves me smiling is that I had no intention of ending this article like that. I stumbled into that ending based on what Chat GPT had to say on the issue. Ironically something artificial but reassuringly human had the last word.