The Votes Are In!

Or, Readers Can Tell, Narrowly, If a Writer is Alive or Memorex

A week ago, I posted two writing samples – one by me, the other by SudoWrite’s “Story Engine,” a generative-AI ‘writer’s helper’-- and invited y’all to cast a vote for which piece you believed had been produced by something with a pulse (me).

Note that I did not ask for votes about the quality of the writing. I am a professional, after all, and it seemed unfair to require a tiny-infant-baby app (even one apparently trained on 32 billion words of fanfiction from the Archive of Our Own) to approach that bar. Plus, had the AI been preferred, it might have broken me. 

Still, I was not surprised to see the voting was neck and neck the entire time the poll was open. Some picked “The Farmer & the Dom” because “[t]he word choice and sentence structure in ‘The Farmer’ is more sophisticated and varied.” Others went with “The Sintaur” because “[j]ust based on vibes, to be honest” or “ [I] was amazed as how clever the AI one was, whichever it was. I voted for the first one, The Sintaur, as human written, though I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong.” In the end, it came down to two votes.

The final number:

In this case, democracy spoke rightly. I, R.W.W. Greene, wrote “The Sintaur” and SudoWrite wrote (most of) “The Farmer & the Dom.” I say ‘most of,’ because I supplied the first two paragraphs of ‘Farmer,’ clipping them off the top of a story slated for publication later this year. (There are no dominatrices in that story, BTW.)

That’s one of the ways SudoWrite can work. Plug some ‘real’ stuff in, and it starts to make words and sentences. It produces two or three options you can choose from and, with your encouragement, writes more. The dominatrix was 100 percent the app’s idea, but I was the one who clicked ‘yes.’

Is this the death knell for writers? The program is only going to get better after all, and it has already convinced a bunch of smart people that it is the one with a pulse. At the SFWA Nebula Conference a few weeks ago, I attended a panel where one of the participants, a writer of informational articles, had already been down-sized because of generative AI. 

The text generative AI produces is already ‘good enough’ to ‘OK,’ and I suspect there are certain types of applications that level of quality will be just fine for. I don’t read much erotica, but I suspect generative AI could turn out something good enough to do the job for a lot of people. Same with informational articles and essays. Anything with a hard-and-fast format and formula, really. And, like I said, it’s only going to get better.

It’s really making me think about the nature of creativity. About a dozen years ago I interviewed one of my favorite authors, Robert B. Parker, and asked him how he came up with his ideas. He said something to the effect of “I know my characters very well, so when I sit down in the morning to read the newspaper I might see something about cybercrime. I start thinking about how Spenser and Hawk would deal with cybercrime, and the story comes from that.’

Years ago, I wrote a blog post based on the idea of a ‘creativity formula’ wherein the writer encounters two data points -- “two-fisted detectives’ and “cybercrime,” say -- and filters those points through everything the writer has read and experienced. Out comes story: Skinny but smart hackers run rings around two aging palooka sleuths investigating a cybercrime. It almost outlines itself. 

That’s not a huge difference from how generative AI works. It puts ideas and words together based on the numeric probability those things would mesh in a response to the given prompt. Its filter, instead of experience, is everything it’s been trained on.

I’ve run many of the creative-writing prompts I assigned to my high-school students through Bard, and it does remarkably similar work, even choosing many of the same themes and storylines the kids did. It may turn out that our vaunted ‘creativity’ is closer to ones and zeros than we might think, especially as we are also ‘trained’ on the work of others.

Creation is not necessarily a sentient process. Evolution has done some incredible things sans plan or focus group. A piece of driftwood, battered at random by the sea, can evoke an emotional response in someone who sees it.

Is there a moral here? Probably not. There’s been a lot of talk about how insensitive the SudoWrite folk were for unleashing their new “Story Engine,” which seems bound to put a lot of writers out of work, when the WGA strike is going on. “Sensitivity” is rarely how technological progress and capitalism work, though. The stuff is here, and it will be used, no matter what the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America may want. The fight will be waged in the courts, whether or not what the AI generates is any good. 

We are on our back foot against something that works much more quickly than we can, learns faster, and despite having no Id of its own, will do amazing things for some rotten people.

NEWS: This week I turned in the last set of edits for “Earth Retrograde,” out Oct. 24 from Angry Robot Books. None of it was written by generative AI, by the way. It’s the end of the First Planets duology, and I think I like it. It is pre-orderable in the usual places.

Meantime, I’ll be hitting ReaderCon July 13-16 and ArmadilloCon Aug. 4-6.  Love to see you there.