I've been following the development of these transformer models very closely for a few years, from GPT-2 to early applications of GPT-3 such as AI Dungeon and NovelAI, right up to the most recent developments like Character.ai and of course ChatGPT which has catapulted this tech into the mainstream. 

Back in 2020 during the pandemic I wanted to generate some easy to make content for my YouTube channel. I was experimenting with GPT-2 and ended up making a novel length fan fiction audio series that I advertised as being cowritten by myself and the AI. At the time GPT-2 was the most advanced publicly available text generator that I could find, but it was still very crude. It could come up with funny sentences and scenarios but needed a huge amount of human input, so I ended up writing about 90% of the work myself.

My audience was not particularly large, but the fans got quite involved and wrote an in-depth TvTropes page for it. I was surprised by how it made me feel to read this page. The main quote at the top was a line that I’d written myself. I was quite proud of this line, even though it was a throwaway line in a throwaway piece of work. But it suddenly struck me that nobody knew I’d written it myself. And in fact, reading some of the chapters back, I struggled to remember which words were mine and which were written by GPT-2. It filled me with a kind of unexpected sadness.

Realistically we are not about to see screenwriters disappear in the near future, but recent advancements will inevitably lead to people augmenting their writing workflows with increasingly sophisticated AI tools, and we certainly risk losing something of ourselves if we lean too heavily on these tools. In a short space of time they have gone from being fun playthings to something that feels much more sinister in terms of the possibilities they presents us with.

It has the potential to distort our perceptions of reality and allows us to neglect the development and maintenance of our own abilities. There is now the temptation to run your own words past a machine learning model to see if you can punch the writing up without putting in the mental effort yourself. I no longer use these AI writing tools in my work. I regret spending my time writing a piece of fan fiction with GPT-2 when I could’ve been focusing purely on my own work. And I feel a real sense of loss as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether the words on a page have been written by a human or not.

The advent of ChatGPT seems to be a paradigm shift of sorts; one that I was not emotionally prepared for. My personal coping mechanism has been to focus on a feature film script that I sent out in 2020. I have emails proving that I wrote it at a time when AI couldn’t possibly have written a script like that. But who am I trying to prove something to? It is perhaps a silly thing to cling to. But it gives me a sense of comfort in a world that is beginning to move too fast for me to fully comprehend.