240. Welcome to the Creative Age

<p>Each November, writers around the world make a commitment. They commit to writing a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month.</p> <p>Since 2013, software developers have also been making a commitment. They’ve committed to <em>generating</em> a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month.</p> <p>The novels these programmers create – if you can call them novels – can tell us a lot about the future of work.</p> <h3>How well can AI write a novel? (Not at all, really.)</h3> <p>The novels that programmers generate are all over the board. One “novel” was just <em>Moby Dick</em>, written backwards. Another “novel” was called <em>Paradissssse Lossssst</em>. It was a reproduction of John Milton’s epic poem, but with each “s” in the poem replaced with a varying number of other s’s.</p> <p>But, some programmers take the task a little more seriously. They train AI models and see what they come up with. One such model is called GPT-2. GPT-2 was once considered too dangerous to release to the public, because you could supposedly generate subversive content en-masse, and do some pretty nefarious things. Kind of like [Russia did with a farm of human-generated content around the 2016 election].</p> <p>And what is this advanced AI model able to generate? So far, nothing impressive. Programmer and author of [aiweirdness.com] Janelle Shane tweeted, “Struggling with crafting the first sentence of your novel? Be comforted by the fact that AI is struggling even more.”</p> <p>The sentence this AI model generated for Janelle: “I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.” Not exactly Tolstoy.</p> <p>The follow up to GPT-2 is now out, so we’ll see this year what kind of novel GPT-3 can generate, but if Janelle Shane’s experiments so far are any indication, humans will still have the edge. She asked GPT-3 how many eyes a horse had. It kept telling her: [four].</p> <h3>Your edge as a human lies in your c