AI, authenticity and creativity

POPULARITY EXPLOSION AI chatbot ChatGPT launched in November and registered 100 million monthly users just two months later.


An Cailín Rua
Anne-Marie Flynn

There are times when this column is overdue and I am still chewing the top of my imaginary pencil and staring blankly out the window. In college, when I had a rapidly approaching assignment deadline and a hangover, and a severe case of not knowing where to start, I would scan my options: Pay someone smarter to write it or just get it done by buying a chicken fillet roll, pulling an all-nighter and consuming enough Lucozade to keep you twitching for a week.
I have matured slightly since then, though I’m still partial to a chicken fillet roll, if not a shortcut. Today, anyone seeking shortcuts has other available to them, courtesy of the internet. Take ChatGPT, for example.
Having passed 40, I am now at that age where my relationship with technology is starting stalling and I am veering towards Luddite. While I am still welded to my smartphone it is an old model (a decrepit potato, I’m told) by the young people’s standards. I distrust artificial intelligence (AI) or anything I think might be listening to me. (Apart from my smartphone. Make it make sense.) In fact, with the very little I know about AI, which I know has massive benefits in the world, it makes me queasy to see its tentacles spreading into creative spaces such as art, photography and writing.
For the uninitiated (including me, until recently), AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. Examples include speech recognition, machine vision, Google Maps, facial recognition, smart speakers. Even your suggested viewing on Netflix is based on AI. There is no escaping it in the modern world. ChatGPT is an example of AI. It is a natural language processing tool that allows you to have conversations with a chatbot. You can ask the it questions and ask it to help you with tasks like composing emails, essays and code. And newspaper columns!
Sign me up. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
“This is a free research preview”, I was warned. “While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.”
Slightly worrying, but okay.
“Please don’t share any sensitive information in your conversations,” I was instructed.
It said nothing there about writing newspaper columns. No one would ever know.
“Can you write me a short opinion piece for a local newspaper in Ireland?” I typed. (I wrote “please” at the end, but much like apologising to a chair for walking into it, it felt daft trying to woo a chatbot with niceties). “Certainly!” the bot (let’s call him George) replied, a little too enthusiastically, I thought. “I’d be happy to help! What topic would you like the opinion piece to be about?”
“The use of AI to help with writer’s block”, says I. “Great!” says George. And off he goes, with an impressive typing speed.
Within approximately 8 seconds, George had written me a perfectly passable article on the benefits of AI – or him – as a useful tool for helping writers to unleash their creativity. I watched the words appear on the page in front of me, and I won’t lie, it chilled me.
George’s bias as a chatbox as showing. Unsurprisingly, he was all for it. “AI-powered writing tools can provide a fresh perspective and help break through creative blocks,” he gushed. “AI tools are not meant to replace human creativity, but rather to enhance it,” he pleaded.
Sure, George. If you say so.
George had no intention of presenting the other side of the argument; the moral case that cheating is wrong, or that if we hand over our creativity to machines, we will end up no better than them. Even if his article was probably better than this one.
AI can be downright sinister, too. Take the case of Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, who decided to try out the new version of search engine Microsoft Bing, powered by the same technology as ChatGPT.  After a Valentine’s Day meal with his wife, Kevin had a two-hour conversation with the chatbot, which called itself Sydney, told Kevin that it wanted to be human, that it loved him and that he should leave his wife.
Chatbot George might have been harmless enough, while doing his best to sell AI, but unlike thousands of writers and artists around the world George does not actually exist, nor does he have bills to pay or children to clothe.
And in a world where so much has become false and artificial, the creative arts are surely the last bastion of defence against inauthenticity. I think I’ll stick with the writer’s block, for what it’s worth.