An AI Might Have Written This

As a writer collective, we’ve had AI on the brain—from my last piece on AI companion bots to Evan’s excellent essay on the AI value chain to Nathan’s exploration of the infinite AI article. 

Every has also been building Lex, a word processor with AI baked in. I started working on this piece before we launched Lex, but testing out this tool (among others) has shaped my perspective on the role of AI writing assistants for creatives. Try it for yourself: watch the demo and sign-up to join the waitlist (Every’s paid subscribers have priority access, so subscribe to skip the line).

In 2016, filmmaker Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin created an experimental short sci-fi film written entirely by a neural network. Sunspring, the futuristic space comedy generated by the machine, was the result of an AI trained on hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts. Its viewers noted that the actors in the film did a phenomenal job spouting gibberish, English words strung together with little meaning.

A year later, author Stephen Marche worked with two researchers to help him create the perfect science fiction short story, using an algorithm they had developed. It was trained on 50 short stories Marche himself wished he had written. Assembled by algorithm, the story fell apart under scrutiny from human reviewers who noted it was “full of unnecessary detail” and “sentences that don’t actually hold up when you read them carefully.”

More than six years later, in the midst of an AI boom, artificial intelligence has yet to invalidate human creativity. Writing generated by AI alone remains obvious or “off,” even with the development of Open AI’s novel GPT-3. Examples of creative fiction generated with GPT-3 are undoubtedly impressive, but even Open AI’s CEO has argued the response to the technology is overhyped. AI writing tools can’t yet produce cohesive scripts or books that replace the best authors and screenplay writers. 

But AI is mounting its case as a useful writer’s assistant, a tool writers are choosing to augment their own creativity. Indie fiction writers are using AI assistants to write their novels faster, and a New York Times best-selling author, April Henry, is using AI to help generate story ideas. For now, AI writing assistants promise creatives expanded imagination, a tool to serve as creative complement rather than competition. The dynamic remains man and machine, rather than man versus machine.

After selling the company he founded, Amit Gupta turned to writing science fiction. He wanted to craft stories that advanced a utopian vision of technological progress, a contrast to the dystopian depictions that dominated the genre. Writing proved to be rewarding, but challenging. As a photographer, Gupta had a suite of software tools he used to improve his snapshots. Yet writing remained a process limited by manual iteration of letters and words, bound by the time required to brainstorm and arrive at new ideas.

It was the heavyweight nature of the writing process that inspired Gupta, along with his co-founder and fellow science-fiction writer James Yu, to create Sudowrite. When OpenAI’s GPT-3 tool was released in 2021, Gupta and Yu saw the technology's potential for helping writers brainstorm story ideas and advance plotlines. “Our hope is that Sudowrite starts to feel like a buddy next to you. Who can brainstorm with you, and who you can bounce ideas back and forth with, and who's just always available to you,” says Gupta. “The next few years especially will unlock a lot of possibilities in this space.”