The beginning of my freelance career coincided with my husband's return to his 9 -5. 

I need all the encouragement I can get starting this new portfolio career because I’m petrified of failing - and that’s likely to come about because I end up binge-watching weird documentaries on Netflix.

So it didn’t help when said husband returned each night animatedly talking about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot he’s begun to use daily - ChatGPT.

He works in the finance industry and has been using it to reply to emails. That’s right - he asked the program to reply to an email by copying and pasting it, and it crafted a reply for him that he was happy to send.

That would have been very helpful in my government work five years ago.

At coffee one morning, he attacked my dreams - declaring that this AI is only months away from taking my fledgling creative career away from me. 

Before my eyes flashed every script being written by AI, every novel, every poem, every song, maybe even every news article.

Great, now I’m even more excited about my new career.

Do not fear - his comments did not reduce me to a puddle of tears over my morning pastry but instead hardened my resolve to prove him wrong. And so my research began.

At its simplest, ChatGPT is designed to generate written text from a prompt I give it. It utilises a vast dataset of online text (the internet) to produce responses that mimic human writing. In the field of creative arts, it can be used as a useful tool to generate new ideas and inspiration for writers and artists. However, it must be noted that it does not possess the capability to independently create original content.

Did you like that paragraph?

I do. It’s to the point, it’s factual, and it was written by AI.

Gotcha!

I could have spent time researching and forming my own definition of AI but why when the technology itself will write it for me?

You might be a die-hard creative, declaring that you’d never commit such a sin! But with the lengths Grammarly goes to rewriting some sentences, I think we might already be committing a lukewarm sin and not admitting it.

There are always going to be arguments about the unique creative voice of each artist - “No computer could ever do that!”

But that’s the interesting thing, it learns. Yes, that’s the frightening plot twist in every story about technology, isn’t it? We create the AI, and then it learns how to outsmart us.

So how should our creative industry feel about this new and very fast-moving technology? 

I’m not sure I have an answer for you or myself at this stage. I’ve only been doing this gig for a short spell, which my research found is much shorter than AI has been “co-writing” scripts. My husband said it was months away, but it’s actually already here.

DeepMind is just one company that has created and even tested its AI scriptwriting technology with writers and actors. They called it Dramatron, which is absolutely the name of a computer villain sent to take over the world. 

DeepMind says they believe in “providing human authors with material for compilation, editing, and rewriting” - which we all know is a sentence a machine wrote.

But not every machine-written sentence is as easy to identify, and here comes the last part that my human-powered research found. 

What’s the deal with plagiarism and attribution?

First up, plagiarism: the scariest of words no writer of either high school essay level to great novelist ever wants to hear.

This technology takes the accumulated knowledge of our world (the internet) and creates something from it. Could there be a risk of plagiarism?

And what about attribution? If a machine writes my script or even my article for a creative magazine, is it really my own work? Can we call this “co-writing” - or whatever the marketing material says - our own work when a human didn’t write it?

Even if I input a logline I’ve created into AI, I get a script I didn’t write.
How do you share an Academy Award with AI? Does it get its own statue, or do I just have to share the gold nameplate with it?

If you’re interested in how Dramatron works but don’t want to sacrifice one of your own ideas to it, see writer and business analyst Kim Sung’s fantasy breakdown script here.

It’s an interesting read, beginning with his initial logline and then every instruction he gave the AI to develop the script. His take-outs are simply that it would take weeks or months to work with the AI to get a good script. 

That still sounds shorter than most human writers.

This makes me believe that our industry is likely to adopt the use of this new tool. How much it should be used and at what stage of the writing process is currently being debated.

ChatGPT was released in November 2022, Dramatron was released in December 2022, and less than a month later, a college student in the United States released what he claimed was an AI app - GPTZero.me - that scans a piece of writing to determine if it was written by a human or a computer.

When I say we’re moving fast, I’m talking very fast.

At this stage, fear will continue to fuel my new portfolio career, but fear isn’t much use in the face of AI capable of creative practice; it’s best to acknowledge that it’s here. Maybe not in its finest form, but it could get there. 

Being afraid of it or just disparaging it doesn’t safeguard anything for any creative. You know, I might even use it as a tool.

The most important point that our industry worldwide needs to figure out (and soon) is the new rules around attribution.

So to make sure I’m honest from the beginning, I wrote most of this article except that one paragraph.

So I’ll correct the byline. It should read - by Saree, co-written by AI (and of course, Grammarly).