The AI Can Be Your Best Friend in Writing

Sigal Samuel expected that she would suffer from writer’s block (the inability to think of what to write) day by day for the rest of her life as a journalist and a novelist. After all, the writer’s block is a part of her profession. But Sigal now thinks that she would suffer less thanks to her new writing buddy, GPT-2.

Let me back up a bit: Six months ago, the research lab OpenAI created an AI system that generates text — from fake news to poetry — that in some cases actually sounds like it’s written by a human being. The OpenAI team has been rolling it out in stages, each time giving us a more powerful version of the language model they dubbed GPT-2, and carefully watching to see how we use it.

They’ve just put out the most powerful version yet. It boasts 50 percent of the power of the full version, which has yet to be released. As you can tell by trying it out for yourself, this model is already plenty powerful.

I was excited to find out what this AI system could do for me as a fiction writer. Over the past couple of years, AI has been creating some pretty striking music and paintings and even Renaissance-style selfies. While some artists worry that AI will put them out of a job — just as it’s expected to do for, say, truck drivers and factory workers — I’ve been more inclined to see it as a collaborator than a competitor. I don’t think AI will be good enough to write a superb novel on its own, but I do think it can be very helpful in a novelist’s creative process.