To be or not to be?

I’ve been loath to get ChatGPT on my phone because I so hate it. You could say it’s my bête noire. But since the boom in AI is inexorable one might do well to shift one’s perspective and see where things stand and whither they are tending.

Just as math is not all about numbers, so a language isn’t all about words. With the recent mind-boggling advancements in AI there’s a growing concern about the future of writers and writing industry on the whole. Now some folks may dismiss the idea that the threat posed by AI isn’t a big issue, saying that AI can never match the creativity of the human mind but this thought isn’t particularly uplifting. Why? Because not everyone is Faulkner or Hemingway or Steinbeck. If those writers were alive today I assume even they would raise eyebrows over the infiltration of AI into their territory. For lesser writers, and especially beginners, the challenge is real.

I recently watched a talk of a young professor of philosophy marveling at the potential of AI (OK that version may be more advanced but that’s beside the point) to answer deep metaphysical questions and he sounded awestruck and somewhat terrified. If AI can infiltrate complex and deep fields like philosophy and math (maybe it can never solve the most complex problems but it does the ordinary kind, discounting the occasional errors it makes), it could very easily write prose and poetry. A few more years, and we could be faced with a force to reckon with. While this does leave one unsettled it’s important to remember to continue trying despite such concerns.

Creative writing workshops must go on and pens must flow. AI is not something to be dismissed lightly for it’s here to stay but it could be put to good use. It’s important to set clear boundaries and let it stay only as the handmaiden whose job is merely to put things in order. The broader and more important tasks should of course rest with the human. In the context of writing this would mean using it as a mere tool to brainstorm ideas and perhaps ask it to prepare the first draft (if you’ve noted carefully, more often than not it repeats phrases and uses clichéd expressions and bromides). Its servant role over, the writer should take the charge themself and improve the mechanical writing AI has produced.

The good news is that humans can play with sentences, invert word order, and use an array of grammatical techniques and stylistic choices to make the prose sing. AI, on the other hand, produces a mechanical output often devoid of creativity. The challenge is real but there’s always a way out. Cheers to all those who ply their pens. The show must go on.

Suhail Nazir Khan, the writer, is a civil engineer.