The One Thing Chat GPT Will Never be Able to Write
I believe there will come a day in the not-so-far future when Natural Language AI tools will become extremely sophisticated, miles more so than they are now.
They will eventually be better writers than the average human. Perhaps better than some of our best.
They’ll generate extremely compelling, accurate, and novel content in a variety of formats. They’ll be able to optimize for different goals, quickly digest terabytes of new data, staying up-to-date day-by-day, and humans will become reliant on it’s stream of clear insights.
That future isn’t here yet, but it’s coming. And it scares a lot of writers.
However, I think there is good news.
There is one thing that AI will never, ever be able to write about.
And it’s the one thing that communication, in its most basic form, was designed to do.
Writing about the human experience
AI, by definition, will never be able to write about its own human experiences.
Because, of course, AI will never have a human experience.
They may be able to mimic other people’s experiences flawlessly — write fictional tales or write compelling stories based on real life history.
But, fundamentally, AI tools will never have the experience of living as a human out in the world and then communicating that experience to others.
And that’s what writing is all about.
The power of telling personal stories
AI will never be able to tell the story of the time another AI broke its heart.
And frankly, even if an AI bot had an experience almost like heartbreak and could tell us about it (maybe that would be an interesting read!) it won’t have direct implications for us.
A robot’s “heart” isn’t the same as ours.
Personal stories connect us with each other. They allow us to see each other in our lives and make us feel understood. Personal stories are the reason we feel like we can do anything or be anything, because we know other people have been and done and experienced the things we want to be and do and see.
AI can’t give us that same sense of security and connection because it’s fundamentally different from us.
The counterpoint: Could AI connection replace human connection?
The movie Her immediately comes to mind.
Here, Joaquin Phoenix’s character develops a deep connection with an AI “chatbot” and it fundamentally changes his world.
Outside of cinema, there have been scary reports in the news about people spending hours and hours with AI chatbots and eventually developing connections.
Which begs the question — if we can build connections to AI, couldn’t it replace storytellers?
Sure, I believe AI-human connections could be built and that AI communication will be able to closely mimic human’s in the future.
But will it have a body? No. (The current forecasts for when a single AI-entity will specialize in more than one task, like language generation and physical movement, are decades away.)
Will it have real human experiences? No.
Will it be able to share its own human experiences with you? No.
There is a philosophical argument to be had about whether, once real AI robots exist in the physical world and can talk and move and share their AI-based experiences, whether that will come close to human-to-human connection.
But that future is far off.
And AI experiences will never be human experiences.
Closing thoughts for writers
Imbue as much of yourself into your writing as possible.
Connect with other writers. Talk about your experiences — inner and outer.
The life you live outside of writing is more important than ever in a world where AI is competing.
- Where have you been recently?
- Who did you meet?
- What did you see?
- What inspires you and why?
I’m optimistic about AI — let’s use it to do the things it’s good at.
Meanwhile, we can do the things that are uniquely human —we can live.
