An author or writer is tasked with describing an event, an object, a person or an event, using his or her imagination. An editor is tasked with shaping text according to the rules of grammar, while bearing in mind the need for clarity, style and brevity.
Artificial intelligence “large language models,” at best, mimic what the human mind can do by sifting through a trillion words, phrases, sentences, and applying that info to the prompt it receives from a human, who is probably trying to avoid having to pay a writer.
Human brains and computers both have circuitry but they do not operate similarly. A writer delivers work infused with color and personality. A writer can take a human reader on a thrilling adventure. A chatbot “LLM” delivers sterile text. GPT-4 passed the bar exam with a score in the 90th percentile, according to the ABAJournal.com, the website of the American Bar Association.
Passing a bar exam is one thing. Getting a ChatGPT- or Bard-written manuscript or screenplay accepted by a literary agent, publisher or movie studio is another. Lance Ulanoff, editor-in-chief for TechRadar.com, recently described his attempt to get ChatGPT to write a Star Trek screenplay. It didn’t go well.
The test was a script featuring legendary characters Captain Picard and Captain Kirk, and the story involved the two of them meeting and working together to deliver dilithium crystals to year 2023, which would mean an unlimited power supply and the reversal of climate change.
Mr. Ulanoff left other plot elements, dialog, casting and screen direction to the AI bot. What he discovered is that ChatGPT apparently soaked up every bit of Trekkie-isms from everywhere then constructed a bare-bones draft. Mr. Ulanoff says: “It was so short it lacked a real second and third act. It seemed to leap from the premise to the conclusion as if it was in a race to get to the end credits.”
To flesh it out, he added some complications to the story and was surprised to discover that the AI program seemed to lose interest.
“ChatGPT seemed to forget it was writing a movie script and just delivered paragraphs of dialog-free text describing the action. It felt rushed, as if ChatGPT was bored with this exercise and just wanted it to be done.”
And then there is the lawyer who recently made national headlines when he had ChatGPT write a legal brief, which was then submitted to the court and other lawyers. The chatbot invented case law. Court officials discovered ChatGPT’s lie (or fiction) when they were unable to locate the cases it cited in the brief. The judge was angry with the lawyer. The lawyer begged forgiveness. He said he had no idea the chatbot would create fake case law.
Chatbots are not ready for prime time when they are throwing a middle-school level homework tantrum (the Star Trek script), delivering unimaginative and boring text, or lying to lawyers and a judge.
On the other hand, human writers and editors have always been ready for prime time. They are not obsolete yet. A hundred million people are presently using ChatGPT to generate emails, documents, speeches, manuscripts and more. The irony is that lowly humans will be the ones to come to AI’s rescue. It is humans who will rewrite AI-generated text so it will be interesting. To other humans. Human writers totally rock. And Ghostwriters Central would know.
Founded in 2002, Ghostwriters Central provides ghostwriting services to clients worldwide.
