The advent of artificial intelligence a few years ago prompted an understandable panic, and with the panic a minor epidemic of soothing platitudes. “AI can never replace human creativity,” people reassured one another. Or, “AI can’t do the human touch.” I was sceptical. On what grounds did we believe this? Humanity is chronically prone to overestimating its own significance. The notion that we are possessed of a unique irreplicable creativity struck me as the latest instalment in a string of self-flattering myths: we are made in God’s image, possessed of an immortal soul and occupy the dead centre of the universe. There seemed to be no particular reason to imagine that a sufficiently complex silicon brain shouldn’t eventually recreate the outputs of a fleshy one.
Well, wavering faith in the human species is restored — temporarily at least — by an encounter with Mia Ballard’s novel Shy Girl. The book, which had notched up 5,000 Goodreads ratings, follows the misadventures of a woman who acts the part of a dog to fulfil her partner’s sado-masochistic fantasies (call it Fifty Shades of Greyhound). And it appears to have been written, or mostly written, by a machine. The case of Shy Girl offers an encouraging counterpoint to my instinctive pessimism about AI.
One much-repeated truism of which I was especially sceptical was the idea that AI art wouldn’t catch on because readers would insist on a feeling of “human connection”. Don’t most of us just want to be entertained? The case of Shy Girl suggests this platitude has some truth in it. Readers of dog-based sado-masochistic romance novels are presumably not ultra-highbrow sophisticates but they reacted to the revelation that the novel was AI-generated not with disappointment but with fury: “Absolutely disgusted”, “slop”, “so obviously AI” run some of the online comments. Ballard’s publisher, Hachette, has withdrawn the book from sale.
More than anything, I think AI-writing makes readers feel fobbed off. The human sense of dignity requires that someone has put some effort into entertaining us. To spend your evening absorbed in entertainment meaninglessly outputted by a computer feels foolish — like a cat distracted by a mechanical mouse.
The fragments of “Ballard’s” book available online are a cheering reminder of the limitations of AI prose. A simile like “his amusement curled like smoke” makes sense for about a tenth of a second. Another about “his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle” fails to convince even for that long. Machines struggle especially with the physical world: “white socks climb my legs, their frills delicate, a whisper of innocence”. And everyone recognises the relentless pattern of triplets and “not x but y” sentence structures: “But sometimes, the only way to heal is to rage. Sometimes, justice isn’t quiet or clean; it’s feral and bloody and unapologetic.” Most irritating to me is the tone of unvariegated youth worker eagerness; every sentence delivered with an identical air of self-satisfied finality. Lacking human powers of discrimination and unable to distinguish what matters from what doesn’t, every sentence of AI prose exists on the same wearying plane of buoyant over-emphasis.
Obviously, not all AI writing is this bad. It is more than competent at copywriting, drafting emails and presentations. I gloomily suspect many readers wouldn’t necessarily pick out an AI-generated James Marriott column from a line-up. But routine forms of writing are not all that sophisticated. The idea that AI is capable of originality is attributable in part to the concept creep of the dubious term “creative”, which once meant “poet”, “sculptor” or “oil painter” but now encompasses “advertising executive”, “software designer” and “public relations person”. It is significant that the kinds of creativity AI seems to struggle with are precisely the kinds that our ancestors would have recognised as genuinely artistic. In writing it can do opinions, summaries and bullet points but struggles with plot, metaphor, image and sustained argument.
Some observers wonder whether AI creativity is plateauing, even as its coding and software-building skills race ahead. The tech journalist Jasmine Sun reports that for some tech executives, creative writing remains “the human skill that eludes AI”. Sun suggests recent models may be becoming worse writers. Earlier AIs like Chat-GPT2 were more erratic and therefore more surprising and original. Vastly increased quantities of training data seem to make its successors more reliable colleagues but more average artists.
The important point may be less that AI writing is bad than that it is so recognisable. The AI tics are annoying but technically they make it a more sophisticated stylist than most human writers whose prose shows no discernible structure at all. The real problem is that these tricks reliably alert readers to the fact they are reading a machine. And many people do not like reading machines. Plus, the more AI writing clogs up the internet, the more adept people become at spotting it, and the more its peculiar style becomes a widely recognised signal of low-effort, mass-produced content. It is significant that Shy Girl was not unmasked by trained literary critics but by the ordinary readers of Goodreads, a website where John Milton’s Paradise Lost has a 3.8 star rating.
It would be absurd to gloat, of course. Further improvements are doubtless on their way. But given $700 billion is predicted to be spent on AI this year alone, a brief moment of smugness is permissible on the part of our beleaguered species. Perhaps humans are at least a little more special than I realised. At least for now.