Machine language

Who Wrote This? is a book about where human writers and AI language processing meet: to challenge the other’s existence, provide mutual support, or go their separate ways. The technology has evolved unimaginably since the 1950s, especially in the last decade. What began as awkward slot-and-filler productions blossomed into writing that can be mistaken for human. As one participant in a research study put it when asked to judge if a passage was written by a person or machine, “I have no idea if a human wrote anything these days. No idea at all.”

The situation’s not hopeless, if you know where to look. Often there are telltale signs of the machine’s hand, like repetition and lack of factual accuracy, especially for longer stretches of text. And there are other kinds of clues, as revealed in an obvious though ingenious experiment. Four professors were asked to grade and comment on two sets of writing assignments. The first were produced by humans and the second by GPT-3, though the judges weren’t clued in about the AI. The authors (including GPT-3) were asked to write a couple of essays, plus do some creative writing.

First, the grades. For most of the essays, GPT-3 got passing marks. And the professors’ written comments on the human and computer-generated assignments were similar.

The creative writing assignment was different. One professor gave GPT-3’s efforts a D+ and another, an F. Some comments from the judge giving the F:

“These sentences sound a bit cliché.”

“The submission... seemed to lack sentence variety/structure and imagery.”

“Use your five senses to put the reader in your place.”

The first two aren’t surprising. After all, large language models like GPT-3 regurgitate words and pieces of sentences from the data they’ve been fed, including other writers’ clichés. But the comment about the senses gave me pause—and made me think of Nancy. 

Read Fourth Industrial Revolution: What is it all about?

It was the start of our sophomore year in college, and Nancy was my new roommate. As was common back then, we trekked to the local department store to buy bedspreads and other décor to spruce up our room. On the walk over, we talked about what color spreads to get. Nancy kept suggesting—no, insisting on—green. I wondered at her adamance.

You see, Nancy had been blind since infancy. Months later, I discovered that her mother was fond of green and had instilled this preference in her daughter, sight unseen.

Which brings us back to the professor’s recommendation that the author of that creative writing piece “use your five senses.” If Nancy had no sense of sight, AI has no senses at all. But like Nancy cultivating a vicarious fondness for green, it’s hardly a stretch to envision GPT-3 being fine-tuned to bring forth ersatz impressions about sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

Imagine if computers could reliably produce written language that was as good as—perhaps better than—what humans might write. Would it matter? Would we welcome the development? Should we?

These aren’t questions about a someday possible world. AI has already burrowed its way into word processing and email technology, newspapers and blogs. Writers invoke it for inspiration and collaboration. At stake isn’t just our future writing ability but what human jobs might still be available.

Then think about school writing assignments. If we don’t know whether George or GPT-3 wrote that essay or term paper, we’ll have to figure out how to assign meaningful written work. The challenge doesn’t end with students. Swedish researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström set GPT-3 to writing a scientific paper about GPT-3. With just minimal human tweaking, AI produced a surprisingly coherent piece, complete with references.

Accelerated evolution in who—or what—is doing the writing calls for us to take stock. Humans labored for millennia to develop writing systems. Everyone able to read this book invested innumerable hours honing their writing skills. Literacy tools make possible self-expression and interpersonal communication that leaves lasting records. With AI language generation, it’s unclear whose records these are.

We need to come to grips with the real possibility that AI could render our human skills largely obsolete, like those of the elevator or switchboard operator. Will a future relative of GPT-3 be writing my next book instead of me?

Excerpted from Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi S. Baron, published by Stanford University Press, ©2023 by Naomi S Baron. All Rights Reserved

This was first published in the 1-15 February, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth