All the Sentences ChatGPT Cannot Find

You have something to say that AI never can

“A play about a guy who murders his uncle you say?” Monkeys taking their work seriously. Image: Midjourney

I have a software development colleague, Mike, who is an AI doomer. He not only believes AI will take his job imminently (and he’s one of the best programmers I’ve worked with), but thinks that it will soon replace all human-created art and music as well. I believe he’s wrong, and that despair over AI displacing human creativity is misplaced. I’d like to explain why, and specifically why you, as a writer, should avoid using AI to write anything creative.

Let’s take music as an example. Mike recently told me he would probably cancel his Spotify subscription and instead listen only to AI-generated music, in a sense fulfilling his own prophecy. Certainly AI music has become scarily good, yet a simple thought experiment reveals its fundamental limitation, the same limitation that all generative AI suffers from. Imagine that AI had been invented in the nineteenth century and a music generator had been trained back then. It would have turned out endless convincing classical music, but it would never have arrived at jazz or rock, or even the avant garde classical music of the twentieth century.

The reason for this is that generative AI systems are stuck within the patterns (the “latent space” in AI terminology) that they have learned from their training data…