TECHNOLOGY
The future’s . . . not all write?
Now ChatGPT has arrived, is AI going to put us all out of a job? Gary Dalkin looks at the way recent developments in artificial intelligence might impact on writers.
Artificial intelligence has been a familiar concept at least since the talking computer in the original Star Trek (1966), and the malfunctioning HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, a ‘character’ written with what now looks like considerable prescience by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Douglas Adams humanised AI with a depressive robot, Marvin the Paranoid Android, and an elevator which sulked in the bottom of the lift shaft in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), and the term AI itself has been in mainstream use at least since Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film of the same name.
For over decade now we’ve grown used to AIs like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri in our homes and on our phones. But then last autumn new apps like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney suddenly meant that AI-generated art was everywhere (including on self-published book covers and comicbooks), and shortly afterwards came ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer). ChatGPT is either a chatbot or a natural language processing tool (if you want to be posh about it) driven by OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of what are known as large language models.