From Medium:
In early 2021 I signed up for the GPT-3 beta program to see how good it is. A few days later I had co-authored Aum Golly — a book of AI poems on humanity. A few months later it was published. This is what it means for writers and publishers.
On January 30, 2021, I realized I was the weak link.
I had been working with GPT-3, the autoregressive language model from OpenAI for 2 hours. I was tired. My creative juices were running low. We had maybe 5 poems ready — out of the 60 or so poems we needed for the book.
I stared at the blinking cursor. GPT-3 was patiently waiting for my input.
To finish the project in the 24 hours I had given myself, I realized I had to change the way I wrote. I had to lean more into GPT-3. Let it do the heavy lifting.
Let go of my ego.
And that’s when things started to get a lot easier.
. . . .
AI for writers: the hype and the reality
Every hype cycle someone says: “This time it’s different.”
Aum Golly, co-authored by GPT-3 and myself, was published in Finland in April 2021. GPT-3 came up with the themes, the title, and the 55 poems themselves.
Having seen what GPT-3, the latest in generative language models, can do, I too am inclined to say: “This time it’s different.”
GPT-3 has been hailed as the newest generation of language models capable of generating text that you can’t tell from something written by a human. For the first 5 minutes of using GPT-3 I was hyped: it really was eerily good, most of the outputs really could have been written by a human.
But what struck me most was how versatile GPT-3 was: it could summarize text, come up with title variants, write introductory paragraphs based on a title… and it could write poetry.
Link to the rest at Medium
Lots of modern poetry written solely by humans reads like random nonsense. It’s no big deal when a computer helps generate it.
Close to what I was about to say – the output might be indistinguishable from that produced by a human writer, but is it indistinguishable from that produced by a good human writer?
And how much is on the reader’s interpretation? In other words, how much “intelligence” is there on the AI “creator” side, and how much on the human reading it? I think modern art (painting, James Joyce, etc) offers some parallels.
I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did. So true, Tony.