In the near future, a new form of intelligent life will emerge. It will be able to read and write at superhuman speeds, and it will have a perfect memory. This lifeform will be able to create new works of fiction, and it will be able to do it better than any human author.
The impact of this new lifeform will be profound. It will change the way we think about the written word, and it will have a major impact on the publishing industry. Authors will no longer be the only ones who can create new works of fiction.
This is not to say that authors will be made obsolete by this new form of intelligence. They will still be able to create works of fiction, but they will have to do so in a way that is different from what they are used to. They will need to find new ways to stand out from the crowd, and they will need to find new ways to connect with their audience.
The emergence of this new form of intelligence will be a threat to authors, but it will also be an opportunity. Those who are able to adapt to the new world will be able to find new ways to succeed.
Well, don’t sugar coat it GPT-3. The strange thing is that when I put in the exact same prompt that generated the above text but without saying it should be in the style of someone, it was a fair more generic piece that talked about the various books that have been published that have been generated by AI.
But when I asked it to do it in the style of Nate Silver, suddenly it’s all ‘the robots are coming and the fiction they will write will make your face melt.’
I had thought that ‘Nate Silver’ style would use a ton of statistics.
ABC ran a piece on the weekend and I fell down a rabbit hole.
I’ve dabbled with some of the AI generators in the past. I had a play with GPT-2 when it was the hot new thing but I always found that it’s output was pretty average.
I’d never played with the image generators though.
Without getting too in depth on how these AI work, you pretty much come up with a prompt (the prompt I used for the text up above was ‘Write an article about the threat AI poses to authors in the style of Nate Silver’) and then see what it spits out. There’s various toggles you can play with that will change the model you are using (the above text comes from the GPT-3 model davinci-02), add noise and randomness, set the length (a good thing given there is cost involved), etc.
I might play again with GPT-3 but for now I feel much the same as I did about GPT-2. I don’t enjoy writing, so it’s nice that I can just massage a prompt to get some text but ultimately it’s lacking in something. Even if you do it in the style of a certain writer (assuming that writer has been consumed as part of the dataset, GPT-3 was trained on 45TB of text, so its likely that if you’re heard of them they are in there), it isn’t your voice.
So I decided to get started with midjourney. Midjourney is one of the larger image generator AIs and also one with the lowest bar to entry (join their discord and then start throwing prompts at their bot… though you only get 25 goes for free and then its $10 a month, which honestly isn’t bad).
The image at the top of the post was done by Midjourney (if you’re wondering the prompt was ‘Neon soaked cyberpunk skyline, oil on canvas, by Jackson Pollock’… I think it looks great).
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