The Influence of AI on Writing: Current Trends and Future Impact

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, but wanted to allow my thoughts on the matter to crystalise a little bit before committing words to digital paper. AI is here. Its been here for a while now but its finally becoming common place in the public domain. Understandably, its making some people upset. We’ve had machine learning (ML) for a while and have gotten pretty comfortable with it, e.g. the camera apps in our smartphones, Google Assistant, Siri, and even Tesla’s Autopilot. ML used data and algorithms to learn and improve its accuracy and interactions with humans. For example, when you watch some videos on YouTube or TikTok, the algorithim uses your watch history to suggest some more videos that you may find entertaining.

The version that has people talking at the moment is a Large Language Model (LLM), which usual neural networks to process and understand human languages and provide responses by parsing through large amounts of data and summarising it very quickly. You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT by now, which is by far the most well known and most successful LLM out there. That’s why Microsoft and Apple Inc have invested in the company. The cover images for the last few blogs I’ve done and have been produced by using Microsoft’s Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E models. However, there are other models out there too, like Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and Arc Search, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s unimaginatively named Meta AI [it’s actually called Llama] and Grok (part of X). There are even a bunch of websites that offer various services that use AI.

Coming back to the question raised by the title of this post, AI is having a disruptive effect on various industries. Writing is no different. An initial problem for authors is that some LLM AI models have been trained on their work without prior permission. This was an issue flagged by a number of artists in relation to AI mimicking their style and themes. Now authors may face the same problem with AI producing better and better pieces of writing as they consume more and more literature produced by human writers. Skyrocket, a tech toy company, recently announced their new toy, Poe, an AI powered teddy bear that can tell stories (using ChatGPT) after the child chooses what parameters they want in their story.

As the technology matures, its going to become harder to distinguish between something produced by AI and by a human writer. This may lead to an even more disturbing questions like, ‘does it matter if it’s written by a human if the writing is entertaining?’ This is usually the point in the article where the author reveals that this article was written by AI, but in this case, it wasn’t. Just the images. Sorry artists. Writing by humans, like art, may be a more boutique experience. It may be that the flaws in our writing become the reason why humans partake of our work. In a couple of years, AI may be able to craft the best stories ever written, with excellent pacing, characterisation, description, flow and everything else we expect from a work of fiction. Publishers will be able to churn out volumes of books at a rate previously only dreamt of, without a writer in sight. Or perhaps publishers will be cut out of the loop too, and printers will be able to produce books written on demand, to the customers preferrences and tastes (just like Poe).

In the meantime, writers need to figure out how to make best use of the technology without comprimising on their ethics. I have a few suggestions: 1) If you are struggling with a book title or chapter heading, ask AI to generate a list of suggestions. 2) use AI to brainstorm ideas (bearing in mind that it is still limited by the content that it has been trained on, as it tends to be quite formulaic). 3) Visualise your characters by generating an AI rendition of them. 4) Speed up research by asking AI questions (but always check the sources as sometimes they are a bit random). 5) Create a draft outline and then play around with it (because its too formulaic). 6) Proofing tools, like WordPress’s built-in AI proofing bot.

How do you use AI to help with your writing? Are you for it or against it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.