By Bernie Bell

I saw this on my friend’s Facebook page, ChatGPT Sucks At Writing Books…THAT’S WHY WE MADE BOOKLE AI!

At first I thought it was a joke – the kind of satire that might appear in ‘Private Eye’ – unfortunately….it isn’t.

I told my husband, Mike, about it, and he said that AI is becoming a problem in Academia as it is possible for students to access AI to write their course-work for them. Qualifications might then become not so much about proving the actual intelligence, inspiration or observation of an individual, as about that individual’s ability to – work AI.

I’m remembering when I was doing my degree, actually writing on paper with a pen. One of my lecturers was amused by how my writing ‘took off’.  One time he said I’d excelled myself as the word ‘characterization’ took up a whole line!

It was because I got so involved in what I was writing about that the pen couldn’t keep up with the ideas and the writing got wilder and wilder.

Another way that Academia could be affected is…. AI hallucinates!  Unscrupulous people could use AI when putting together (note I don’t use the word ‘writing’) Research papers.  They could hit a problem there as, apparently, AI ‘hallucinates’ – makes up and includes incorrect ‘facts’. How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing

I think this new development is appalling.  Mike then told me that, with the system he uses which connects with AI, when he gets an incoming email – the machine suggests possible answers.  Not so bad when it’s just a matter of saying ‘OK,  thanks a lot’, but what about when someone is telling someone something ‘real’ – would the recipient of the message use the suggested words as it easier to do so?  Once again, through AI/Social Media etc., real human interaction is being eroded.

I’m glad my machine doesn’t do that  – I’d throw something at it!

Then we were considering music – wondering do young people still get instruments and get together in garages to make a devil of a racket?  Or does one person sit in a room, telling AI to write a song about…. in the style of….. – and then post the result on …is it Tik-Tok?  I is well old and out of touch. 

This hearkens to George Orwell’s futuristic novel  ‘1984’, where a theme is fed into a machine which produces ‘music’ to kept the Proles happy.  I’m getting more and more certain that George Orwell ‘saw’ the possibilities of what was ahead for humanity.

I read a book by Doris Stokes….in which she was contacted by George Orwell.  He explained that he could see the future, and his way of sharing what he saw was to write – including 1984.  An awful lot of what he writes of has started to happen in recent decades. 

I was interested to see that he didn’t present this as being simply an idea he had – but as information that he was given.

And there’s Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Galapagos’..

‘Galapagos’ by Kurt Vonnegut – A Tale For Our Times

My tuppenceworths…Search results for ‘Artificial Intelligence Bernie Bell’

When discussing this, a friend emailed to say…

”It’s incredible that anyone could promote such a system, which will simply flood the world with ‘books’ written by AI on someone’s 10-minute whim.

It looks to be part of a process whereby any activity or effort is considered something to be avoided, so that we should just sit in armchairs and watch a screen. We will be like a character in a play by a 19th-century French writer, who says: “Living? Our servants will do that for us.”

But in fact so much of what makes us all human comes about through working away to solve a challenge, whether gradually building and looking after a garden or working away at a book and gathering facts and shaping each sentence with care.”

And another wrote….

“AI’s way of making a text is essentially an engine for making perfect cliches, unmarred by any new idea. AI text is basically plagiarism, not from one original source, but from all. When I was a professor, there were a few students who had almost mastered that art. It was used and homogenized dead food (for which there is a less polite word). They always got a B-. They were amazed—that was what they had been taught to serve up to their teachers. So the upside may be that AI will be a comeuppance for the educational establishment. The Humanities are about what only humans can do.”

Indeed.