Why AI can't take over creative writing
In 2022, 74 years after Shannon's proposal, ChatGPT appeared, which caught the attention of the public, with some even suggesting it was a gateway to super-human intelligence. Going from Shannon's proposal to ChatGPT took so long because the amount of data and computing time used was unimaginable even a few years before.
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) learned from a huge corpus of text from the internet. It predicts the probability of the next word given the context: a prompt and the previously generated words.
ChatGPT uses this model to generate language by choosing the next word according to the probabilistic prediction. Think about drawing words from a hat, where the words predicted to have a higher probability have more copies in the hat. ChatGPT produces text that seems intelligent.
There is a lot of controversy about how these tools can help or hinder learning and practising creative writing. As a professor of computer science who has authored hundreds of works on artificial intelligence (AI), including AI textbooks that cover the social impact of large language models, I think understanding how the models work can help writers and educators consider the limitations and potential uses of AI for what might be called «creative» writing.
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LLMs as parrots or plagiarists
It's important to distinguish between «creativity» by the LLM and creativity by a human. For people who had low expectations of what a computer could generate, it's been easy to assign creativity to the computer. Others