Stephen Marche in The New Yorker:
Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In July of 2019, Microsoft invested a billion dollars, which allowed OpenAI to create a supercomputer with two hundred and eighty-five thousand C.P.U. cores, ten thousand G.P.U.s, and four hundred gigabits per second of network connectivity per server. Microsoft claims that it ranks in the top five supercomputers in the world, processing more than twenty-three thousand teraflops per second. The power of the supercomputer has been transformative. GPT-2, which John Seabrook took for a test drive in 2019, asking it to write an article for The New Yorker, had 1.5 billion parameters. GPT-3 has a hundred and seventy-five billion. (A parameter is a configuration variable required to make a prediction in machine learning.) Brute computational power is why Sudowrite can write like Kafka.
GPT-3 hints at a world in which machines can generate language. The consequences are vertiginous. To spend ten minutes with Sudowrite is to recognize that the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure. Take an A paper, change a few words in the first paragraph, push buttons three times, and you have an essay that fits the assignment. Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed. The changes that are coming are fundamental to every method of speaking and writing that presently exists. . . .
[When writing his poem “Kubla Khan,”] Coleridge was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock,” and, “on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” If Coleridge had Sudowrite, he would have typed in what he had and pressed a button.
When I pressed the button asking Sudowrite to continue “Kubla Khan” in an “ominous” style, it generated the following:
The old Moon shook her silver tresses
The new Moon bow’d her golden horns:
While all the stars that round her burn’d,
Bow’d to the ground and based their fires.
To the one ever-branching cloud
That blew and drifted—blow and drift;
To the one moon that alone swung,
Colossal, glimmering, through the sky;
I bowed my head and half-believed
A dizzy spell had made me dream.
The tumult ceased, the clouds were torn,
The moon resumed her solemn course,
The stars were faint, the dawn was near,
And faintly from the distant sea
What seemed a misty-white and slender rod,
A phantom-wand, a beam of light,
It grew and grew to a towering spire,
A seraph-wand, a sun-bright sail.I find this beautiful, memorable. If you told me that Coleridge wrote it, I would believe you. The machine even put in the indents.
But what is writing this? Who is writing this? In a sense, Coleridge wrote it. He articulated the pathways of its manufacture. I suppose that I could be the author insofar as I selected the passage and pressed the button. Or, thinking broadly, the author of this passage is the entire corpus of human language processed through GPT-3. . . .
But GPT-3 points to a deeper question: In what way did Coleridge write the original lines of “Kubla Khan”? He himself doubted whether what led him to have the manuscript of “Kubla Khan” in front of him could be called writing. He said he composed it “if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” He considered his own work the vessel of a force outside himself. And this is not an experience unique to him. The oldest poems in the Western tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin with an invocation to the muse, a plea for a mysterious, unfathomable other to enter the artist, taking over, conjuring language. GPT-3 is a mysterious, unfathomable other, taking over, conjuring language. It is a muse you will be able to access for fifteen to twenty dollars per month. . . .
For those who choose to use artificial intelligence, it will alter the task of writing. “The writer’s job becomes as an editor almost,” Gupta said. “Your role starts to become deciding what’s good and executing on your taste, not as much the low-level work of pumping out word by word by word. You’re still editing lines and copy and making those words beautiful, but, as you move up in that chain, and you’re executing your taste, you have the potential to do a lot more.” The artist wants to do something with language. The machines will enact it. The intention will be the art, the craft of language an afterthought.
For writers who don’t like writing—which, in my experience, is nearly all of us—Sudowrite may well be a salvation. Just pop in what you have, whatever scraps of notes, and let the machine give you options. There are other, more obvious applications. Sudowrite was relatively effective when I asked it to continue Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I assume it will be used by publishers to complete unfinished works like Jane Austen’s Sanditon or P. G. Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings. . . .
Gupta knows that Sudowrite is only beginning to sense, dimly, the possibilities of GPT-3, never mind the possibilities of artificial intelligence in natural language. GPT-3 is perhaps the Model A of this technology. The above is a small taste of what can be done at a hundred and seventy-five billion parameters. What happens at a trillion? What happens at ten trillion? The human brain has about a hundred trillion parameters. What happens when the technology passes that number? “It’s early days,” Gupta said. “I see a future where it gets super more sophisticated and it helps you realize ideas that you couldn’t realize easily on your own” . . . .
Already, what GPT-3 shows is that literary style is an algorithm, a complex series of instructions. The reason a passage from Kafka or Coleridge or Englander doesn’t look like math is because the mind isn’t capable of holding a hundred and seventy-five billion parameters at the same time. Very soon, when you read a text you will not be able to assume a person intended or wrote that language. Eventually, this technology will escape the confines of the scientific realm, to those who use language to manipulate and to control, and perhaps even those who use language to express and celebrate.
Source: “The Computers Are Getting Better at Writing” (April 30, 2021)
And suddenly I’m flashing on Theodore Roszak in Where the Wasteland Ends, written fifty years ago as a preemptive commentary on this New Yorker piece and the cyberpunk-esque nature of its anti-utopian vision:
The more objectified the study of behavior grows, the more remote it becomes (at least for many scientists) as a form of experience known from within. Until it finally becomes quite sensible to speak of machines that “see” or “remember,” “think” or “create” — as well as people, or even better. . . .
Within recent years, I have come across glowing reports of computer machines that have “consciences,” that “teach,” and “learn,” that “compose music,” and that “feel” and “hurt,” even machines that do or will soon do architecture. . . .
The prospectus for artificial intelligence machines is limitlessly optimistic. It includes their use as a superintelligent governing apparatus to run a total national economy and to plan military strategy. . . . Richard Landers looks forward to the day when our closest friends will be “conversation machines” . . . so much better than real people. “When the day comes that conversation machines are developed, I strongly believe that many will prefer them to humans as telephone partners — particularly the machines that are ‘tunable’ to one’s personality.”
Source: Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1989 [1972]), 269-270