Why AI can’t take over creative writing

Vancouver, Apr 6 In 1948, the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, proposed modelling language in terms of the probability of the next word in a sentence given the previous words. These types of probabilistic language models were largely derided, most famously by linguist Noam Chomsky: “The notion of ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one.” In 2022, 74 years after Shannon’s proposal, ChatGPT appeared, which caught the attention of the public, with some even suggesting it was a gateway to super-human intelligence. As a professor of computer science who has authored hundreds of works on artificial intelligence, including AI textbooks that cover the social impact of large language models, I think understanding how the models work can help writers and educators consider the limitations and potential uses of AI for what might be called “creative” writing. Some positive uses of LLMs for creative writing Writing is like software development: Given an idea of what is wanted, software developers produce code analogously to how writers produce text in a natural language. Generating good prompts How to generate good prompts has been advocated as an art form called “prompt engineering.” Proponents of prompt engineering have suggested multiple techniques that improve the output of current LLMs, such as asking for an outline and then asking for the text based on the original prompt augmented with the outline.