The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Debate

AI is the biggest news story of 2023, causing impassioned debate in the creative community. (Listen to The Creative Penn podcast by author Joanna Penn or read her blog.)

Opinions can be polarised: on one side, you have a kind of utopian optimism (I, for one, welcome our robot overloads). And on the other extreme, apocalyptic doom-mongering.

I want to create a middle ground. I’m aware of the dangers and respect potential rights issues while accepting that AI is already here, whether we like it or not. I have to ask myself whether there is a safe and ethical way to use AI tools.

OpenAI‘s creation is Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT). And it’s the tool I’ve been playing with since hearing about it on Joanna’s podcast, hoping to make some marketing tasks more efficient rather than something more creative.

The explosion in popularity of ChatGPT has caught everyone by surprise. A few days ago, it passed 100m users—the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

For context: it took Instagram two years to reach 100m users. TikTok did it in 9 months, the pace of its growth throwing all the other social networks into a panicked redesign.

ChatGPT hit that milestone in 2 months!

man in black crew neck t shirt sitting beside woman in gray crew neck t shirt
Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels.com

Why is AI so controversial?

The depth of feeling on this issue is substantial. This is to be expected with any technological advancement which has the potential to be hugely disruptive. But it’s not just disruption which is causing concern.

As an editor and writing coach, I will not enter into the sea of societal and political concerns around AI. However, there are pressing issues specific to authors, artists, voice actors, etc., which I want to talk about.

Although I see the positive potential of AI, significant questions remain about how those Al models were trained:

  • Were creators’ work used without permission?
  • Were any rights infringed?
  • Plus, what is the legal status of work created with AI-powered tools?

Those questions have not been addressed adequately. Legal action has already been filed against Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, claiming that billions of images were scraped from the web without authorisation. (The first of many such steps, one would imagine.)

However, whether we like it or not—whether we’re ready or not—AI is already here.

They’re here.

AI is now being incorporated into Bing, and Google will follow shortly with its own version of AI-augmented search.

AI tools are now being incorporated in all sorts of other places, which will increase their usage exponentially. For example, WordPress announced that it is testing generative AI art blocks. This means that I’ll be able to effortlessly generate AI art by typing a description of the image I’m looking for right there in the back end of my WordPress site.

Change doesn’t wait for you to be ready. AI isn’t going to pause while everyone explores all the issues. The moral and legal issues around creators, rights, infringement, and the copyright status of anything made with these tools or the ramifications for society at large.

AI isn’t just here already—it’s about to go mainstream. And that’s going to make it impossible to ignore.

apple laptop notebook office
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Apple and AI Audiobooks

Tech giant, Apple announced last month that it would accept AI-generated audiobooks for the first time, something that most retailers like Audible don’t permit yet as I write this. Not only that, but Apple would provide AI narration tools to authors and publishers.

You can see why the idea is attractive to some: audiobooks can be expensive to produce (or require an incredible time investment if you make them yourself). Having AI narrate an audiobook would solve that problem neatly, significantly reducing the time and money needed to produce audio editions.

What worries me is the fate of some narrators. Voice actors are suddenly facing an existential threat of their own after finally seeing a viable and healthy audiobook market come into being. I’d be surprised if any real audiobook lovers welcome this development.

I’ve been told that some YouTube videos now seem to have AI narration. The quality is generally awful. Although it’s claimed that AI narration will soon be almost indistinguishable from human narration.

However, even if AI narration improves considerably, I doubt the quality could be as good as a human narrator. There’s more to narration than simply reading the text.

The worry is that once Apple has cut the narrators out, they’ll put the squeeze on authors next.

ChatGPT and Authors

What’s of most concern to authors is how AI might affect the future viability of their profession. The disruptive threat facing today’s narrators is just the beginning.

The most obvious concern is that authors could be replaced by a bunch of story bots chained up in the basement of Penguin Random House.

But after playing with Al a little, we’re still quite far away from it producing professional-grade creative work. Of course, given the pace of technological development, we can’t rule out an AI takeover in the future.

high angle photo of robot
Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels.com

My take on ChatGPT

I’m an independent woman, so even though there are genuine controversies around AI tools, I want to know a little more about how they work. This helps me understand the issues better.

I also want to see where all this AI stuff is headed. Work out how it might impact my business.

I’m no expert; if anything, I’m late to the party. But I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT recently and can see some potential in marketing terms. (I’m not using it for creative work at all.)

I heard it suggested that you shouldn’t think of ChatGPT as an expert-on-call, as the media often portrays it. A better approach is considering it a team of interns with boundless energy.

photo of women at the meeting
Photo by RF._.studio on Pexels.com

They often make mistakes, and you definitely have to check their work. Still, they can take much off your plate with clear parameters and constant supervision.

Here are some things I’ve been playing around with using ChatGPT.

•            Taglines, product descriptions, and sales copy

•            Social media text, captions, and headlines

•            Newsletter subject lines

•            Brainstorming/bullet pointing/outlining

Some of the stuff generated was useful, while others were terrible. However, I got better results when crafting more deliberate and detailed prompts. And I got the best results when I forced ChatGPT to refine its responses—one of the most impressive parts of this tech.

ChatGPT can give you an answer to whatever you ask. Still, you can interrogate it and force it to amend its responses based on more specific parameters. This process can lead you to the pot of gold you’re looking for.

person reaching out to a robot
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

The AI middle ground.

I hope I have eased some more fanciful concerns about AI replacing humans entirely. Creativity still needs a human mind—at this point, anyway. Al needs humans to input probing questions and analyse, interrogate, and curate the output. Humans will iterate the prompts and know when the true destination has been reached.

And then—most importantly—to execute the information generated.

We’re not obsolete quite yet!

About Kim

I'm Who Am I? I'm a woman of many talents and interests!! Of course, who isn't?! I've just had my 50th birthday, I live in England with one husband and two daughters. I own my own editing business (Brockway Gatehouse) while still working part-time as a Teaching Assistant at a local primary school.​ I love reading (obviously), listening to audiobooks, watching documentaries about the natural world and ancient history plus films of many genres.
This entry was posted in the craft of writing and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Debate

  1. Wendy Williams says:

    Thanks for this informative post. I’ve learned a lot about AI reading this

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.