AI Is Not a Content Creator But a Content Diffuser
No doubt that AI brings efficiency to writing, but what’s the purpose?
Humans get excited when something new changes paradigms that have stayed unchanged for centuries, and a dream has come true when automation makes it easier to complete a demanding task.
For example, think of how the world changed when we started moving with cars instead of horses. A machine replaced an animal, making it incredibly more efficient to reach a faraway place. Has this remarkable improvement changed the way we decide where to move?
More, think how the world has changed when the Internet has become the way of sending messages across the globe. A machine replaced human letter carriers who traveled worldwide to deliver messages. Again, efficiency in communication got incredibly increased. Has this remarkable improvement changed the way we decide what to communicate?
The two examples above show that more efficiency does not automatically bring more purpose. But efficiency is exciting! When humans are excited, they focus only on the source of the excitement and lose the context.
Nowadays, something similar is happening for artificial intelligence (AI) in writing. As we don’t use any longer (except in rare situations) horses to move and letters to communicate, let’s imagine a world where humans stop writing (except in rare situations), so everything written comes from an AI.
Critical question
Does who or what writes a piece change the purpose of reading it?
I don’t think so. We read to get information, for entertainment, and to discover. Who matters if an AI wrote what we read?
From the reader’s standpoint, a world where only AI is the writer looks very similar to the old one, where humans were writers. As far as the pieces of writing meet the needs of their readers, it’s just a matter of the quality of the writing, not really of who or what wrote it.
When it comes to the quality of writing, the pivotal question is: will AI ever be able to write Romeo and Juliet? I think so. Not tomorrow, but AI will soon be able to deliver the entire literature.
The point is that AI will be able to write something similar to Romeo and Juliet because the human William Shakespeare wrote it, and some other human put it into the AI learning path.
Back to the critical question: would you enjoy less Romeo and Juliet if AI wrote it? I don’t think so. Nevertheless, before William Shakespeare, would AI be able to write something similar to Romeo and Juliet? Who knows? It is unreasonable to expect it because AI can elaborate on provided input but not get it from experience.
Elaboration, dreaming on dreaming
AI now has an impressive capacity to answer questions, like the famous ChatGPT shows. Its ability to elaborate on provided input replicates what humans do. AI does nothing new but snappy. Extremely snappy.
Sometimes, a quantitative increase leads to a qualitative change. For AI, quantitative growth is speedy in producing decent pieces of writing. Does this lead to some qualitative change?
We write for someone to read. The impact of Ai is that we’ll have much more to read because writing with AI takes much less time. The point is: What kind of writing would we read if all writing pieces were AI-generated? Does it imply a qualitative change in our experience as readers?
AI is trained on the Internet, the shared soul of humans. From this standpoint, what AI produces is dreams. Imagine: You experience a football match at a stadium, where your beloved team wins. Then, at night, you dream of being the player that scored. Dreaming for you is almost effortless, like writing for AI, and the result is similar: you get a representation of something else.
The qualitative difference stays in the input source. For humans, the input source is the experience of the world. For AI, the input source is the Internet, which, in turn, is a human representation of the world.
AI, as a writer, cannot experience a dog; instead, it can learn from what humans wrote about dogs. It’s a second level of dreaming: a dream of a dream. That’s the kind of writing we’d read if AI were the only writer.
Purpose
Machines, by definition, execute commands, however complicated they may be. AI is a machine that executes two commands:
- Store a representation of the inputs.
- Based on different inputs, produce other representations similar to the stored ones.
That’s great. We’ll soon read some fantastic variations of Romeo and Juliet. But what’s the purpose?
Commands are meaningful inside their context of execution, and purposes are outside the context: machines, again by definition, cannot decide what to calculate and why. The consequence is that AI writes purposelessly, but we, as readers, don’t care because we are excited to consume something from a machine we have been reading from humans for millennia.
When enthusiasm dominates, the truth remains in the background.
The truth is that AI is not a content creator but a content diffuser: it brings content from somewhere on the Internet. AI is a new Google Search that can search by meaning instead of by terms.
Would you ever say Romeo and Juliet is the result of a search with Google (or similar)?
Conclusion
Speaking about writing is always about readers: who matters about writing content nobody reads? AI in writing is not an exception to this rule.
On the other hand, the purpose of writing is not to write more and more effortlessly. The purpose facet of writing is the human side: AI doesn’t have a sense; AI calculates, and even when it appears to be sentient, we know that it calculates.
Sure: human writers calculate, too. Researching, techniques, and editing are a form of calculus we apply to create writing pieces.
The difference between humans and AI is not just that AI calculates better and faster. The critical difference is the training behind the ability to write. The Internet teaches AI, and life teaches humans. Yet, humans create content on the Internet. So, humans, or a weighted average of them, teach AI.
Since we saw that AI can be considered the next step in searching the web, AI creates a search into what we teach it. There’s no creation but search results.
AI cannot get drunk and write its feelings. AI can only search on the Internet what humans wrote about being drunk. And so on.
That’s it.
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