The might of an '​AI'​ pen, and its fallacy.

In defence of human creative writing and what AI writer-bot probably can't do. 

Of late, have read few articles on the power of AI in writing. AI, it seems can now write whole articles convincingly. All one has to do is feed the bot a line or topic and it can spit out whole article with a fake and believable quotes too with names of real people. OpenAI, the company behind development of this bot is so convinced of the might of this artificial pen that it is reportedly afraid to release it to general public - fearing misuse.

AI bot taking over human job of creative writing could be a reality in near future - but - I would say - a human bot job in writing.

What do I mean by that?

We are so much used to write and read like bots ourselves already - in all our political and corporate writing. What all AI can do is just pickup stale longish phrases to compose a prose and further aid in the decadence of the language - as George Orwell would have put.

Few points to paraphrase Orwell*:

- Don't we, human beings write like a robot - take help of ready-made phrases like "being given to understand, the fact of the matter is, with respect to" which hardly add meaning to the prose but assist in constructing a nice and balanced looking paragraph and help us write quicker. When we think of an abstract topic, such phrases come rushing in and they are irresistible.

- A simple verb becomes a phrase. Instead of "break, stop, spoil, mend, kill", a verb becomes a phrase, made up of noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as "prove, serve, form , render, play" etc.

- Passive voice is used whenever possible in preference to active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds ( by examination of instead of by examining)

- Using words like "plastic, human, values, natural" which do not mean anything in concrete and are meaningless are used instead of graphic imagery to express exact thoughts or simile. The problem with such words is that they are not only vague but could mean different things to different people and in turn hardly expressing exactly what the writer is trying to say. Well, sometimes in political writing that itself is the agenda! (being dishonest and vague which in turn to confuse/mislead readers) And sometimes writer himself is not sure of his/her exact thoughts on the matter but writing for the sake of it :)

We are used to all this kind of prose which is composed of such things in our political / corporate language. We are so used to it that these phrases, words come to us subconsciously.

Read an excellent book recently by an Omani author Jokha Alharthi titled "Celestial Bodies"[translated in English]. This is one of the perfect examples of imaginative writing which has many dense narratives of a intricate workings of human mind(expressed via different characters in the novel) and does not dole out such ready-made phrases and follow a road-map. Poetry is another area where AI would not make sense at all. It is a different matter some of the poetry written by humans itself is pointless/meaningless but the joy of enjoying a journey of deciphering the meaning and images of a beautifully written rich poetry is something which AI would be unable to give to the reader.

AI would just further write more such paragraphs with a long string of words - which are meaningless but promote an apparent balanced prose which looks acceptable (or official jargon) to the consumer corporate/political reader-bot in all of us. 

* Ref: Politics and the English Language - George Orwell(Essay)