The AI Bullet Train

If you want to know what’s new in the publishing world it’s all about AI.

The Oxford Dictionary defines artificial intelligence as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” 

From the moment we relied on computers to perform tasks: batch processing punch cards that processed payroll, calculating changes to a spreadsheet, sending a message to our friend across the country, moving money through the banking system, we’ve been barreling along on the artificial intelligence train. It was a steam engine.

Now it’s a bullet train.

So why is it all the rage, literally and figuratively?

This article from The Written Word about publishing trends gave me a bit of the plain language I was searching for. Not surprisingly, the top four trends in publishing deal directly with AI.

The number one trend, Artificial Intelligence Gains a Foothold In Writing, claims AI tools will help writers overcome writers’ block and increase their productivity. By mining their previous texts, it would generate the next logical paragraph(s) based on its iterative learning of that author’s style.

The AI tool Sudowrite is offered as an example. Sudowrite (ignoring the name’s ironic suggestion of fakery) will help with descriptions, pacing and editing. It will generate the next 300 words of your draft (and then the next 300 and so forth?) It will generate feedback when asked (goodbye writing group?)

But this promo (posted on the Sudowrite website) from author Stephen Marche caught me laughing out loud.

For writers who don’t like writing—which, in my experience, is nearly all of us— Sudowrite may well be a salvation.

It begs the question - If you don’t like writing, why are you a writer?

Anyway, there’s a free trial so I did a quick test drive before I passed too much judgement.

I entered the first 1200 words from an old fiction manuscript into the software and asked it to generate further work. The results were amateurish. It never picked up on the story line. Instead, it generated paragraphs that mimicked the ones it had just read, only modified in rather transparent ways. It also failed to match the first-person, present tense point of view used in the other paragraphs.

Next, I selected the word “bear” from the manuscript and asked Sudowrite to generate descriptions. It did offer something from each of the five senses of the word - How does a bear smell? How does it look? etc., plus it added suggestions for descriptive phrases and sentences as well as offering metaphors. Some of that might be helpful, but not in its original form.

Based on my limited experience, it’s hard to identify just how useful Sudowrite would be.

Stephen Marche, however, seems to have mastered the technique of using AI to generate fiction. His latest work was written using three different software programs (including Sudowrite), the idea being “the author ‘teaches’ artificial intelligence to write with him, not for him,” per the New York Times in this article by Elizabeth A. Harris. (The comments on this are fascinating.)

It did make me wonder – what’s the correct response if an agent asks if your work was assisted by AI?

After these few hours of folly, I’m not going to claim that I can speak intelligently about AI, or how it will impact writers, only that I’m slightly less uninformed about it. 

See also this wonderful post from Elizabeth Solar: Here’s Why a Bot Won’t Write Your Next Novel