Publishers Perspective: What Does The Future Hold For AI?

Publishers Perspective: What Does The Future Hold For AI?

– By Josh Warburton –

I have a confession. My last article wasn’t completely written by me….I had a little help. If you happen to read my piece in July, then you read an article assisted by AI. That’s right, while searching for ideas for my last piece, I took ol’ Google Docs up on the offer to “help me write.” And it did that. I scanned through the text it created and felt like it made some excellent recommendations. Now it was a bit discombobulated and repeated itself quite a bit, so I just kind of took a few of the highlights and worked it into my own thoughts. And if I had to guess, it probably took me about the same time as it would had I written it from scratch, as I’m doing this time. But no one seemed to notice. I didn’t get a single comment that I “sounded like Chat GPT,” the insult Chris Christie lobbed at Vivek Ramaswamy at the first GOP debate.

That said, it felt strange. Even though I could have just as easily done a Google search and incorporated some of the results, this felt a bit different; a bit like cheating. And even though I only lifted portions of the suggested text, and reworked the rest to give it my tone, it definitely gave me pause as to how AI is likely to be used moving forward. But the scary thing was how good it seems to be getting at writing and also how inaccurate it can be.

A few weeks before creating my last article, I had experimented a bit and prompted Chat GPT to write a press release about Queen coming to perform at Madison Square Garden in the near future. While it had no problem writing a complete press release in an engaging style, it also said that Freddy Mercury was excited about returning to the venue. Freddy died in 1991. When I shared the press release with our editor, he was floored by how good the writing was overall, as was I. Frankly, it was as good of a press release as we usually receive, other than the inaccuracies of a few critical facts.

So, what does the future hold for AI? Nobody knows! But know this: it’s getting better and better. Soon, it may be hard to distinguish images and writing produced by AI. And then what? Does the next generation of AI integrate text that’s been produced by other AIs and incorporated into what it creates? Wouldn’t that be like a snake eating its own tail? Does it all end in regurgitated mediocrity? Only time will tell.

While you ponder that, I hope you’ll dig into this issue of The Independent, which is packed with fun things to do and experience in real life. Before the robots take over, we may as well see some good entertainment. Happy reading!