Even a hobby that grew out the 1800s can't hide its head in the sand when it comes to tech.
I mean, we try sometimes. Scott Monty really tried to get some of us into RSS feeds at one point, and, boy, did I resist that one. And a certain major Sherlockian or two who did not shy away from the description of "Luddite" never helped in certain areas. But when the robot monster is in the room with you already, you need to learn to recognize its moves.
We saw AI art invading some spaces first, with its added thumbs, bad eyelines, and having a certain someone siting in what appeared to be mid-air in a Baker Street scene seen by a goodly number of folks. It looked like good art to someone without an eye for detail or style, but it was definitely problematic.
And this past weekend, I made my first attempt at reading a book that was aided by AI and several software utilities in the writing of it. Some had an interesting idea and turned to the machine to fulfill that idea's promise. And the result was rather generic.
I was having an issue trying to describe how the writing style felt, and then I ran into a line in a Harvard Business Review article that seemed to get at what I was thinking:
"AI provides a single synthesized perspective, but creative insight depends on exposure to multiple human viewpoints."
A single, synthesized perspective. The style of writing becomes the style of the AI. Maybe it's just cleaning up the grammar, suggesting a more perfect way to express an idea, or . . . suggesting a better version of the idea. But in the end, the software becomes the true author, ghostwriting in its ghostiest form, no different than if you said "Hey, could you rewrite my book for me to make it better?" to another person. But since it's not another person, just a tool we're using, it seems okay. But if we all asked the same person to rewrite our work? It would all wind up sounding like that person.
I couldn't get over how vanilla the style of the book I was reading was. I had no sense of the author's true voice. Their characters also all spoke in the same voice in dialogue, like a world populated by Mr. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
AI is getting smarter. And I'm sure someone with start working with prompts to tell it "Rewrite my mystery in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," then touch it up a few times and get something less generic sounding. And some "writers" (note the quotes) are not shy about admitting leaning on the software genie to do their work. As I wrote this blog the New York Times came out with a piece on a romance writer bragging about how she could "write" a book in a couple hours. She used a great number of pen names to keep pulling this fraud, but since AI can also track AI, there are those who are tracking the number of AI-written books out there by phrases no human would use, like "ragged prayer." Certain word combos turn out to be the "missing finger" of AI word slop.
It was telling fact that today's news feed also had an article about reading and writing reducing the risk of dementia as we age. But reading and writing also reduce the risk of being just plain stupid in your younger years, and . . . well . . . if AI writes for us, and then starts to read for us, synopsizing things into video explanations by AI pundits . . . you can see where we're headed. At some point, Sherlock Holmes isn't just a fictional character. He also becomes an unrelatable wizard whose mental magic seems inhuman and disappears from our cultural landscape.
Sigh.
