At an event a few months ago, I was introduced to a journalist as an award-winning author. He turned to question me, an almost imperceptible edge to his good-humoured tone, “Why do you think ChatGPT won’t be able to produce writing as good as any author now?”
I replied with equal good humour – and perhaps a more perceptible edge: “Ah, because ChatGPT can never replicate the place of passion and anguish that writing comes from.”
To write, not to produceIt’s certainly the question du jour on everyone’s lips. A spate of scandals in the last week alone have catapulted the usually stolid literary world into a dramatic confrontation – with publishers, authors and, most pressingly, its own identity – of proportions usually reserved for keeping up with reality TV stars.
The Granta-Commonwealth-Prize debacle, hashed and rehashed across think pieces and unthinking Twitter squabbles, needs no recapping. Shots were fired by James Daunt, CEO of Barnes and Noble, when he openly declared his willingness to sell books entirely produced by AI.
The admission from Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk that she asks “the machine”, “Darling, how could we develop this beautifully?”, hit harder still; if a Nobel Prize winner (!) needs AI to write, is there any hope for the rest of us? Does the...
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