What It’s Like to Write Articles with Artificial Intelligence
How to write with technology without losing your voice
--
I see GPT-3 both as a threat to the conventional notion of writing, but also as a great new tool for authors. Perhaps an analogy is useful here: I’m a calligrapher, and I learn about the Gutenberg press. It makes sense to learn how to work together with GPT-3 as a collaborator, especially when cost isn’t the issue. I’ve written about this before, and have been meaning to make more time and energy to keep at it.
It’s not accessible to everyone yet (check out CopyAI, Snazzy AI, and ShortlyAI), but undeterred, author Vauhini Vara emailed GPT-3’s parent company OpenAI CEO for access to GPT-3, which she got shortly after. (There’s no reason to think you can’t do the same.) She writes at Believer:
I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing. When I carried my computer to bed, my husband muttered noises of disapproval. We both make our livings as writers, and technological capitalism has been exerting a slow suffocation on our craft. A machine capable of doing what we do, at a fraction of the cost, feels like a threat. Yet I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3 — to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them.
She’s entirely right on the nuance of this; I would add that GPT-3 didn’t ruin writing, money flowing out of the businesses of publishing and writing did. Disruption caused by the Internet did. I don’t make my living as an author; never have, and with the understanding that if I do, most of the career will involve self promotion.
Vara writes:
I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.
Vara worked with GPT-3 to write about a story that she couldn’t bring herself to write for years. GPT-3 acts as a word generator, which authors can…
