AI writing has arrived, and it is alarmingly good
Writing that was produced by AI is already a reality.
AI writing is here, and it's scary how well it can write. Can academics and writers change?
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in its ability to write text that looks like it was written by a person. Because of this, AI writing is becoming more common, and businesses and organisations are using it to write everything from marketing copy to financial reports.
Even though AI writing is still in its early stages and isn't perfect yet, it's clear that it could hurt the jobs of professional writers. After all, if a machine can write text that looks like it was written by a person, why would anyone hire a person to do the job?
AI could also take over jobs that don't require much skill, like writing content. Even jobs that require a lot of skill, like journalism and writing novels, could eventually be done by machines. In fact, a Japanese company has already made an AI system that can write novels better than humans.
Obviously, it will be a while before AI writing is good enough to completely replace human writing in all genres and formats. But as technology keeps getting better, the day will soon come when machines can do our jobs better than we can.
The four paragraphs above were written by the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, which is OpenAI's deep-learning AI writing model (GPT-3).
The program's words can't be told apart from those of a human writer, and it can respond to any prompt a user enters. It can also write a short story, hold a conversation, or report the news, among other things.
This makes me wonder: Is this the end of writers?
Professor Mike Sharples, who has spent decades studying writing and AI, says that the answer is "not yet."
"You can take a kind of end-of-the-world view and say AI will put professional writers out of work; it's all bad news, and AI will take over," he said.
"Or you can look at the situation as if the glass is half full and say that there are some great tools on the way that we can use as writers and as teachers."
Sharples is a professor of educational technology at the UK's Open University. He has written a lot about AI writing and how it is changing, and he thinks that it is pointless to try to stop it in professional writing, business, or academia.
AI systems aren't always up-to-date on what's going on in the world because of how they are trained. This is good news for journalists and others who write about current events.
Even so, he says that writers "should be worried" but don't need to panic just yet.
AI writing is being used more and more to create web content, especially for marketing or blog posts, as companies compete for SEO supremacy.
More and more job postings on freelance work sites like UpWork are looking for writers who can use AI writing tools like Jasper to create content faster.
"You could look at this as a huge help, a big tool that will help you write faster so you can get your words out there and get published." "You could also see it as a threat, since anyone could be doing the same thing," Sharples said.
People tell stories on social media sites like Reddit about how they used AI writing tools to get good grades in school or college, or they ask for advice on which tools to use so they don't get caught.
One user said they were a university biochemistry student and told Vice's Motherboard, "For biology, we would learn about biotechnology and write five good and bad things about it." I would ask the AI something like, "What are five good and bad things about biotech?" and it would give me an answer that would get me an "A."
Work that used to take them two hours now only takes them twenty minutes.
Even the most up-to-date plagiarism checkers can't keep up, which is a problem for those who give and grade academic writing assignments. Sharples says that trying to do this would be "a pointless computational arms race."
He says, "The AI isn't just copying bits of text from the web; it's actually making new text. It's thinking of new ways to say things. So the usual methods won't be able to find it.”
It is not always right. Sharples used AI to write some essays that, at first glance, seemed to be written by real people and wouldn't show up in a plagiarism check. But there were some problems.
The AI knew that a good academic paper should have references, but when it was looked at more closely, it was found that some of the references were made up. Some of the references that the AI used came from studies that said the exact opposite of what the AI was saying.
He also said that if a student's writing suddenly got better, that would be a more obvious sign that they were using AI writing tools.
Sharples thinks that educational institutions need to accept that AI writing is here to stay, just like professional writers need to accept that AI writing is here to stay.
He says that teachers and policymakers need to change the way they evaluate students and that AI systems could help students learn to write better.
They can quickly show students different ways to say the same thing, or they can be used as a creative exercise where students write a story with the help of an AI tool.
A lot of AI creation tools have come out at the same time that AI writing tools have become more popular.
The company that owns Facebook, Meta, just released an AI tool that turns text into videos that look like GIFs.
DALL-E 2 is another tool from OpenAI that anyone can use. It turns text into still images.
Sharples, the professor, thinks that the future of AI content creation is going to be multi-media, with smarter ways to make text, images, and videos all at once.
He also thinks that pure AI writing will get better because the AI systems will be "pre-trained" with more recent content, which will allow them to write about more current topics.
He also thinks that they will start to mix in models of how the world really works, which will make the writing even more "coherent and plausible."
He thinks that our everyday word processors will soon have AI writing assistants that are very smart.
Microsoft invested in OpenAI, so he says, "Microsoft will want to get its money back by putting these into Microsoft Word and other tools." So you'll just see them used all the time, and they'll be part of the writer's arsenal.