This has been the year of panic over artificial intelligence. It will take over our jobs! It will replace journalism, fiction writing, and maybe even songwriting! This panic has shown up in reactions to a measured statement by the board of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. Three members of the board have resigned over the statement.
It begins: “NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI.” That’s not a very tactful way to start, I’ll grant; it could easily be read as endorsing the use of a computer to write your work for you. A clarification was added after the first paragraph, saying, “We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.”
With the clarification, it seems reasonable, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Few things will get you blasted more intensely than refusal to condemn something categorically. AI can play many roles. I run my writing, including this post, through Grammarly, which claims to use AI in its grammar checking.
What seems to have outraged people the most is this: “We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.” I’m never thrilled with the tossing of “woke” jargon around, and this seems to be saying that it’s unfair that better writers should produce better work. But looking at the details, it’s not quite that bad.
For example: “Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one.” Well, yes. I could hire a copy editor instead of using Grammarly, but that would be ridiculous. No one is paying me for this blog.
The statement ends: “For all of those reasons, we absolutely do not condemn AI, and we recognize and respect writers who believe that AI tools are right for them. We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that’s perfectly fine. As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.” That sounds fine to me. Nothing in the statement says that people should use AI to replace their own creative work.
“Artificial intelligence” is an ill-defined term. Back around the 1960s, it meant the holy grail of having a computer that could think like a human, or at least be indistinguishable in practice. Over time it came to mean anything done by software that some people had thought only humans could do. Examples include playing master-level chess, translating from one language to another, and driving a car. But then came ChatGPT, and it set off a panic over our coming robot overlords. Specifically, it lets a computer impersonate a bad writer. Magazines have been flooded by computer-generated submissions. LinkedIn drives me crazy with its constant requests to let its AI rewrite my posts. Some of these concerns are real, but they’ve blown up into a general panic.
In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum created a program called Eliza that would run conversational scripts. The best-known of them emulated a psychotherapist whose strategy was to rephrase whatever the patient said. (“I am worried about money.” “Tell me more about why you are worried about money.”) Some people actually tried to use it for self-help. Today, CGI software lets old actors look young and creates entire landscapes and space fleets out of pixels. In the near future, we may get phone calls from voice robots carrying out realistic conversations. Scammers and propaganda operations will take advantage of the possibilities, but people will get real benefits in many cases.
Sometimes it can be creepy. I just took a break from writing this to call a very close friend and got a “Google Virtual Assistant” wanting to know if my call was urgent. I said nothing and it said it was checking with the person I called. (Which means they’re getting interrupted or awakened anyway.) After a couple of minutes of silence, I gave up. There’s no question that the inappropriate intrusion of AI can be disturbing.
Computers can do wonderful things and horrible things. This is nothing new. People have panicked over computers taking over. This is nothing new either. But these days a lot of the panic is coming from people who should know better.