I Need To Scream

The title of this post is a reference to the short story by Harlan Ellison entitled “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.”  For those who haven’t read it, it’s about an Ai that takes over the world and leaves only three people alive to torture forever and ever.  For those who don’t know how it ends – SPOILER ALERT – one of the captives eventually figures out how to kill the other two and is on the verge of killing himself when the AI stops him and turns him into a giant green gelatinous blog that can’t speak.

I bring that up because we now have something called ChatGPT, a sort of AI that can develop original work(supposedly).  Of course, it can also turn into a lonely stalker and develop plans to murder the entire human race as well.  I’d have thought that the mountains of movies we have warning against this very thing would’ve at least given us pause before jumping in with both feet, but I’ve learned to never underestimate mankind’s predilection for stupidity when it sees a potential advance.  To quote Dr. Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so worried if they could that they never stopped to consider if they should.”

Will original novels and stories be a thing of the past if ChatGPT gets too powerful?  It and other AIs can write faster than a person can.  Most of what it writes, though, is controlled by an algorithm of predictive text, so will it really be original?  Can it shock us and take plots in unexpected directions?  Algorithms are written by people, and people have biases, so by learning enough about the programmer, can’t we know the story in advance?

I think AI will always lack in dramatic twists and turns, limited by machine predictability and the bias of the person who wrote the code.  I don’t think an AI can ever become as original or unpredictable as a human being, so writing original stories should be safe for the foreseeable future.  Or at least I hope that’s the case…