Future>Fiction

Chat GPT. I know, I know but stay with me.

Depending on when you’re reading this we may still be in the middle of our own existential crisis or, perhaps, robots will have taken over the world using information that we have given them freely. Hard to know.

The internet will tell you (so it must be true!) that a recruitment agency shortlisted a candidate’s profile that was really a Chat GPT submission; that lecturers are in a tizzy about the potential for plagiarism and that the critical essay is dead. It also shows you pictures of people who knit hats for their cats.

Will Chat GPT and its offspring spell the end of creative writing as we know it? Depends on your definition of creative writing.

Will it spell the end of creative writers? In a word. No.

Recently I had to deconstruct a writer and their work as part of an assignment for the MA. I chose Neil Gaiman. As I analysed his stories, his style; I began to see the patterns in his writing and to understand the way in which he constructs his dialogue. With enough analysis and reading (years probably), I am sure I could write something in the same style. But I am not Neil Gaiman. His imagination is not mine. His experience is not mine and moreover, to be able to write like Neil Gaiman, there must have been a Neil Gaiman, as a writer, in the first place.

This circular challenge of creativity. For an AI to emulate, they need access to the source and for now, even if they are capable of derivation, the source is mostly human.

There is no doubt that it can ‘tell’. All the examples by the various people writing about the ‘death of the writer’ have tried it and it has delivered. Something familiar; something comparable which is unsurprising because most literature has some degree of intertextuality.

But if we really want to assess any AI language model’s creativity, we shouldn’t ask it to write an opening to a fantasy saga in the style of Robert Jordan. We should challenge it to create something in a voice and style we have not heard before. Anywhere.

Because as writers, isn’t that what we strive for? A place in this world, on a bookshelf or in a digital library, which is so uniquely our own that we cannot be mistaken or forgotten.

So, what is the future of fiction now that Chat GPT has arrived?

Like CGI, deep fakes and the Abba Voyage avatars it has a stunning capacity to replicate based on the data we make available to it. It is an impressive research tool although it does tell you that it doesn’t get it right all of the time. It can help you generate ideas, follow theories and just like any good search engine, allow you to disappear down a rabbit-hole of irrelevance.

However, when I asked it to ‘imagine what happens next’ – its response what that it could not know exactly what happens next.

And therein is the crux of it all. Until androids can dream of electric sheep; until it can ‘imagine’, I think writers are safe (although we should probably remove all references on how to take over the world from its data sources).