WRITING AND AI (PART 1)

There has been so much talk and discussion about AI in the last year and its potential to change every aspect of our lives, including what we love and live to do - writing - that I had to put my two cents into the debate.

THE BEGINNING

In another post I mentioned ( CHECK THE POST HERE) the reason why I love to write scripts; because of its ease of structure. This allows me to write many stories that I would otherwise pass up because of time constraints. It's as simple as that. But before any of this Chat GPT stuff, I always wondered what would it be like if I had someone, an assistant, helping me write some of the stories that I had in my mind. Something akin to a ´ghost writer´. Wouldn't that be great?

Suddenly, an ad popped up on my screen touting a new tool called ´Script Writer´, or something like this. I can't really remember the name now. Well, it promised to become your writer assistant for $9 dollars a month. Are you kidding me? I had to check this out. I read reviews, saw several videos of people that used the product, and after that I took the plunge.

I must admit it, I was a bit nervous the first time I used it. What if it really worked? What if it produced something much much better than what I had thought of? Well, I just threw at it a huge and detailed prompt of a story I had already written and was very happy with, in order to see what it would come up with. Yes, I wanted to quickly compare its potential. If it gave me something better than what I had, then I would start to worry. Well, it was a DUD. Big and heavy and literally useless.

So I canceled immediately. Still, I could sense some sort of potential. Almost a year later, at the beginning of 2023, I signed up for this new tool that I started to hear about; Chat GPT. And it was free. ¨Well, well, well. let's do it again¨, I said. I performed the same test. Now, the immediate results were definitely something else. The clarity and quantity of diverse ideas was far superior to what I had seen before. Yet, it was still not good enough. But at this speed of technological change, what would the world have a year later?

Well, now is a year later and we have all seen the astounding advancement this technology has taken. And let's not kid ourselves, it's future potential is mind boggling. What the hell happened? 

I´m gonna go back to the beginning of 2023 when I first used Chat GPT. I really wanted to know how this technology could have changed so much in such a short amount of time. So I started to do my research. In February 2023, there wasn't much written about it back then, so it was kind of easy to filter out any information. Then, I found a Lex Fridman video where he was interviewing Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher. And what I heard during the 3 hour conversation left me aghast. Wow! What an eye opening moment when Eliezer explained the inherent dangers of this new technology, and how if left unchecked or controlled, humanity could be facing an extinction event.

Link to must see YouTube video: Fridman & Eliezer -

https://youtu.be/AaTRHFaaPG8?si=PyUfct8vT2Szge4j

At this point, understanding clearly the potential dangers, why worry about writing and other mundane things? I´m not going to lie, the whole thing got to me. It shook me. All I could think about was my family, my children and their future.

And then Bing appeared, and then Stable Diffusion, Midjourney etc. It was pretty clear that this technology and the companies behind it were not going to stop continuously bringing new and more powerful AI tools. It also became very apparent that no one was controlling or even trying to slow down this powerful technology. Did these companies really know or understand the inherent dangers their technology possessed? Maybe they didn't care or wanted to admit it? To me it seemed like Eliezer´s warnings were not being heeded, and all these companies were thinking of was market positioning, market share, money, profits and power.

End of PART 1.

Thanks for reading. Diego.