Those two little letters, AI, which means Artificial Intelligence have become quite popular. What a fantastic invention! A new horizon opens up with the possibility of having this system do the tedious and boring work for us. Instead of looking up questions we have and doing research for hours or even days on a specific topic, we can now ask Chat GPT and in minutes or even seconds it comes up with all the answers we are looking for. What a brilliant idea to invent such an intelligent system!
I can also ask Chat GPT to come up with a suggestion for writing a paper or a speech. I no longer have to ponder for days about what I should say at that convention or this wedding. No longer do I need to look for the right words to convince my customers to buy my goods. There’s no more stress because I must come up with a good idea for a proposal. How marvelous! Instead, I can sit back and relax, drink my cup of tea, go for a walk, short, enjoy life, and have so much more free time.
Really?
Well, I have been told that I should let Chat GPT write my stories. I thought: Great, I think I should try this. At least it could write a first draft and then I can do the fine-tuning. It would probably take half the time or even less while I do something else, even start writing another story.
Do I really want this?
Recently, I attended an advanced training program for English. * AI was also a topic at that seminar. We did an exercise where we first wrote a very persuasive, yet diplomatic letter, and emailed it to a very close customer on a Friday night at 4.45 p.m. asking him to send us spare parts so they would arrive the next morning. To complicate matters, the next day was the wedding day of his daughter. Then, we would let the four most commonly used AI programs write the letter with the same requirements. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, all our personal letters were a lot more empathetic, precise, and accurate than any of the AI-letters.
Although AI might become a lot more advanced and sophisticated, it will always lack the one ingredient that makes true writing genuine and valuable. That is the soul behind the writers, the love and compassion and the passion for what they are doing.
But this is only one of the reasons I would not want to let AI write my stories. If I allow a system to express myself, then I don’t need to think anymore. I don’t need to ponder, to ask myself to look beyond what I want to say. Although it might take work to find the right expression, to find the word to describe my feelings, to search for just the right tone to give my piece the sound I want to have it. What I would call creativity is what I find pleasurable about writing. It is what gives me the joy and the satisfaction of creating. I am convinced this can never be done by a system. It will always be artificial, no matter how clever it becomes. It will always be a product without love, without a soul.
What first looks like a great help might actually become a backlash. We might lose our ability to create. It is a well-known fact: What you don’t use, you lose! The creativity cells in our brain will shrink, atrophy, and eventually disappear completely. Our systems might become more and more intelligent while we humans become more and more imbecilic.
The well-known 18th century German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote a poem with the title: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Der Zauberlehrling). There he describes how the apprentice made the broom do all the work but, when the work was finished, the apprentice forgot the magic word to stop it. The famous outcry became: The spirits I summoned, I can’t get rid of them! (Die Geister, die ich rief, werd ich nun nicht mehr los!) Finally, the master returned and said the magic word to make the broom stop doing the work.
This powerful metaphor seems to match the situation we are now in with AI. So far so good, but what if one day we want to stop it? Does anybody still know the Magic Word? Will a master be coming who knows the Magic Word to stop AI?
* Paul and Helga Smith offer a free program, called One Word a Day, where you get each day an English expression or word to test your knowledge. They give 3 options and you go for the one you think is correct. They complement the answer with examples of how to use the word, the origin, and when to best apply it. This way I have been adding to my English vocabulary for quite some years.
Why not check it out for yourself: www.owad.de