In recent years, artificial intelligence has made rapid advances in natural language generation. Systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now produce coherent paragraphs of text, engage in complex dialogues, and creatively respond to prompts. As AI continues to get smarter and better at generating natural language, what might this mean for creative professions like writing and publishing?
One area that could see major changes is the process of drafting and writing books. Tools like ChatGPT could help authors overcome writer’s block by suggesting possible paths forward, or generating additional paragraphs or pages of draft text that the author can then edit and build upon. Entire first drafts could potentially be produced using AI, which the author can then heavily revise and rewrite to reflect their own voice and story.
This could significantly speed up the book writing process and allow authors to be more prolific. However, some argue that AI will never replicate the human creative spark – the intuition, life experiences, and empathy that allow a gifted wordsmith to craft a timeless work of literature. AI may be best suited as a way to assist human authors, not replace them.
The impact on publishers could be equally complex. On the one hand, if quality book drafts can be produced faster with the help of AI, this could provide more opportunities for publishers to find and develop successful titles. However, publishers would need to adapt their acquisition processes to evaluate works that were created partly by algorithms. There may also be difficult questions around determining proper attribution and how AI’s role should be credited.
Overall, while ChatGPT and other advanced AI’s show promising language capabilities, human authors and the publishing industry have little to fear – at least for now. AI will likely remain a tool to complement and augment human creativity, not replicate it. But as natural language systems continue their rapid development, the rise of ChatGPT could foreshadow some exciting possibilities for storytelling and change the book writing process as we know it.
OK – I admit it, I hold up my hand. That entire blog, every single word, entirely unedited, was written for me by Claude, the ChatGPT engine from Anthropic.
As a test, this is the simple phrase I entered into Claude, “write a blog about the emergence of chatgpt in the book writing and publishing industry.” A typical blog can take me as long as a two or three hours to write. This one took me all of ten minutes, and most of that time was spent choosing funny gifs.
Anthropic has released Claude on Slack as part of its beta program. While it’s aimed at organizations, any individual can use it to ask questions from any field.
1. If you don’t have a Slack account, head over to this link and create one for free.
2. After that, open this link and add the Claude app to your Slack account.
And, away you go. Give it a test and then go panic buy some baked beans and tins of SPAM. It’s time to prepare for the dominion of the machines.
Writer & Novelist 