An artificial intelligence application is radically changing humanity’s relationship with writing: the archival ChatGPT3, which last week mutated into GPT4. It has been so successful that the web has collapsed, and in a few weeks it has become paid. And it has generated unexpected mutations, such as God in a Box, which allows you to dialogue with the algorithm in WhatsApp, or Radio GPT, with music automatically broadcast and texts read by synthetic voices. Books co-written with ChatGPT3 are published. And Roger Chartier gives his opinion.
Deep learning neural networks GPT, developed by the company OpenAI since 2015, were in the minority until the end of last year. Trained with thousands of texts, they are able to generate natural language. Each text they produce after receiving an instruction is different, without any phrases copied from the internet. But GPT2 and GPT3 only generate short texts, with no connection between one and the next. With the ChatGPT3, on the other hand, they have acquired continuity. The way has been opened for them to soon be able to write hundreds of coherent pages. An essay, a collection of poems, a novel.
Since in 2016 the newspaper The Washington Post began to publish sports news written by an artificial intelligence called Heliograph, algorithms have been gradually introduced into our daily writings. The option to auto-complete a word or sentence when composing instant messages or emails coexists with chat with customer service bots.
During these same seven years, books have been published that used these new technologies of artificial writing. In 2018 the American author Ross Goodwin published 1 The Road, which transcribed the conversations and geographical coordinates that were captured by the sensors of a car during a journey. The popularization of GPT2 in 2019 and GPT3 the following year saw the first titles written in collaboration with algorithms go on sale on Amazon: from Pharmako-AI , by K. Allado McDowell, in English, to a Non siamo mai stati sulla Terra , by Rocco Tanica, in Italian. But there were no more than a couple of dozen books co-written with artificial intelligence until February. Then ChatGPT3 led to an explosion of nearly 200 self-published titles on Amazon. That they don’t stop growing.
If the GPT2 could only write surreal texts, the GPT3, on the other hand, is already capable of writing sensible texts, just like its Google antagonist, LaMDA. The GPT4 means a qualitative new step, along with other neural networks that we do not yet know what they will be capable of. It is impossible to know how far we are from the generation of powerful literary texts, with a metaphorical dimension. At the same time, the automatic production of images is altering the working world of designers and illustrators. Everything points to the coexistence of two parallel circuits and markets: that of works signed by men and women and that of artificial creation. Machines have long been better than us at chess and go, but that didn’t mean the demise of human-to-human matches and championships.
The confusion that is causing the irruption of generative writing in professional fields such as journalism or content for social networks and websites has updated the already classic equivalence between the revolution of the internet and that of the printing press. “It’s a dangerous idea”, says the prestigious professor, essayist and expert in the history of the book Roger Chartier, who is in Barcelona to present Geografías imaginarias (Siglos XVI-XVIII) (Ampersand), a study on maps in editions Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and other modern classics. “Because it is completely different to read on paper or read on a screen, it means going from a spatial and physical logic, in which there is continuity and there is a set, to a topographical or thematic logic, by a classificatory order of information, without clear context”.
The same happens between human and artificial writing. Of the two previous great cultural revolutions in human history, the shift from orality to writing and from handwritten to printed books, only the latter is well documented, so it is only natural that we turn to it for better understanding what is happening now Perhaps we were too hasty when we thought that the internet was the big turning point and it will be, instead, artificial intelligence.
Chartier has explained in his reference titles, such as El orden de los libros (Gedisa), that the printing press did not suppress the circulation of hand-copied books, which were cheaper and allowed additions to be made or censorship avoided. I ask him if he thinks that coexistence will also be typical of the 21st century: “Historians are the worst prophets, because they can only prophesy the past”, but “to ensure this coexistence I believe that educational, cultural and political institutions must defend the book on paper, publishing houses, bookstores and libraries, if we want these devices that are characterized by their architecture and nature of memory and legacy to continue to exist. Not everything is on the internet. And no large structure guarantees the preservation of documents in the long term. This is why traditional libraries and archives remain fundamental.
“Have you tried ChatGPT3?”, I ask him. And he answers me that no, because he is afraid, but that he is interested in automatic translation: “They sent me a translated book, for dissemination, and I was surprised because I only found two errors, this is, on the one hand, fascinating, but on the other hand it will be catastrophic for the translation profession”. Without a doubt for the translation of manuals and best-selling novels. Complex literature and poetry cannot yet be translated by machines. Not written. This is why the future of journalism may be literary. Not only at the level of words and images, but also at the level of the look or the structure. Perhaps it is necessary to join, as happens in the metaphor, two concepts or two references or two unexpected topics. Like artificial intelligence and a historian expert in the books of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Because a machine wouldn’t do that. At least, for now.
Electromagnetic fields. Teorías y prácticas de la escritura artificial ) is a book written by Jorge Carrión with the artists and programmers of Taller Estampa and GPT2 and GPT3 algorithms to explore new literature.
