There’s been a ton of videos showing the ways that ChatGPT can give YouTubers, podcasters, and others ideas for stories. Could it work as a creative tool for novelists as well?
So ChaptGPT is an AI, which I believe is based on a form called GPT-3. There’s already a GPT-4 in the works, that’s apparently next-level in its conversational style.
Just on a side-note. I think one of the reasons a number of people are excited by this system can be explained by the software programming community. I saw on Twitter a while back a bloke who was programming something in the Python language, and chatted to ChatGPT about what he wanted. After just a few sentences, ChatGPt wrote it for him. It got a few things wrong, did some pieces of the routine in a funny order, and there were a few specifics he hadn’t told it about, so it didn’t know to do.
After a few more minutes of tweaking, ChatGPT was finished. He added the routine to the software, made a few changes, tested, tweaked, and it was done. It took him half an hour of chatting and fixing up. But that’s a job that would have taken him 6 hours if he did it himself.
Imagine in the future an ambitious software project, that today has 60 programmers working 12-hours a day, 6-days a week for 9 months to get it all done. Fast-forward five years from now, and maybe it’s one programmer, and an AI chatbot. They finish it all in two weeks. The same software. A fraction of the cost. A fraction on the time.
“So what?’ you might say. “That’s just software.” But EVERYTHING is software these days. It makes the world go round. Ergo, the world will go round faster. AI bots have been able to recreate data modelling scenarios that took humans a few years in less than a month. Modelling revolutionary drugs for candidate trials that took years could be done in a fraction of the time. We might be on the cusp of an exponential growth curve. Post-scarcity, the works.
It’s important to hold back on the hyperbole though. We’re in danger of getting overly-excited only to see the pace of change dip for a while before realising its potential. But still, in five or ten years, this could all be very exciting indeed.
And what could this mean for novelists? Given its potential, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor thing. But as of now, I think ChatGPT is still free to use. To create and account. Brainstorm some ideas. You never know, you might be surprised with what it’s got to say.
Andy Jones Online 