Navigating AI-generated literature

AI-generated copy has been on my mind lately.
I haven’t even dabbled with CHATgpt or other bot apps that create copy in whatever form. I initially think it saps our creativity and leads to ‘plastic’ literature and journalism.
But I also look back at the rest of my life and realize quickly that I’m usually the last to the party when it comes to things the rest of the country, or world for that matter, are up to speed with.
That includes fashion, kitchen appliances, tech gadgets, and health crazes. Don’t get me started on how long it took me to “chip my jeans” or not wear socks with sandals. I’m about three years behind in the use of an air fryer, but that thing does wonders with a roast and veggies. I wore a smart watch for about a year, before it froze up for some reason, and haven’t purchased another one out of frustration.
I had a random conversation with a person I had just met at a Central Lee baseball game and we debated the value of chatbots doing our work for us.
My main concern is the lack of human creativity, which is tremendously ironic since human creativity produced Artificial Intelligence apps. But I am not as interested in reading books as much anymore because it feels like a shortcut and slap at history’s great writers.
Men and women sat at tables with ink and paper, typewriters, word processors, and now laptop computers pounding away at ideas from the brain and heart. AI may have a brain, but it cannot have a heart.
But how does that transition into news and sports writing? An app called GameChanger, by Dicks Sporting Goods, allows people to follow high school sports by simply searching for teams using the app.
The app generates a recap of the game based on inputs from the person who is keeping track of the game through the app’s back-end system. It’s not great and can’t be used in bonafide news agencies. Not only are their legal and ethical issues using an AI-generated recap, but there are accuracy issues with names and positions.
But it’s one of the first apps out that does this for high school sports, and it will be improved. You can bet on that. Will people stop reading sports in newspapers in lieu of apps like GameChanger? That’s a real possibility. They don’t have photos, and they don’t have comments from coaches and players. That’s probably a simple fix with an audio piece. The app does allow livestream of the games for higher level subscriptions, so video is already in play.
Will apps catch the energy and emotion of the games? They try, but it reads robotic with syntax issues and sometimes no first names on first reference. Sports are filled with emotion and energy and I’m not sure how AI-generated copy can do that justice. It takes a person capable of bringing that about.
What about news coverage? Are we using chatbots to clean up copy? I’m not, but I’ve certainly been giving it some diligence. I do use Microsoft Word’s dictation function to turn audio recordings into written text. There are a lot of apps out there that do that, including Otter, but what I’m seeing is that I type pretty fast and I can clean up the ‘ums’ and duplications, and “you knows”. When dictation runs, it tries to clean up what it’s hearing and its pretty fascinating, actually.
But the amount of correcting I need to do on an edit of the recording is a little time consuming, so I’m not sure if it’s actually saving me time or not. I believe that it is. I’m concerned about where that ends. The app that extracts a story from a livestream can’t be far away. Companies will capitalize on that for sure. Most governmental meetings now are livestreamed so the app could monitor the meeting and create a story with actual quotes. So, with that in mind, my brain goes to a product that does this. Monitors governmental meetings, and high school sports, tracks weather and lotteries, and public records from court databases and you have the makings of what essentially is a news product.
So, as I sit pondering at what point my job becomes obsolete, I remember that I’m 56 years old and it probably won’t be in my lifetime. So I’ll keep plugging away and watching as things unfold.
My concern then turns to books and magazine articles. I recently read a piece in a magazine about Rob Lowe and his 30 years of sobriety around the twists of turns of Hollywood. It was nice and a quick read. I believe it was a quick read because it was written that way by someone who understands that we should write as people talk. It’s smoother that way, and it allows for much better comprehension. That’s why so many people struggle with technical books, and older history books, Shakespeare et.al. because they don’t cater to our simplicities of the English language.
AI will certainly teach itself to adapt to these different styles of writing. It almost feels inevitable.
So then it just comes down to the human creation. I want a book that someone wrote with their own capabilities. I don’t want literature that came from an idea that was handed over to AI to generate copy in the background, while we go about our lives. It’s cheating people like Hemmingway and Hawthorne – Dickens and Rowling – and Shakespeare and Fitzgerald.
At least, it feels that way to me, - but that’s Beside the Point.
Chuck Vandenberg is editor and co-owner of Pen City Current and can be reached at Charles.V@PenCityCurrent.com.