Please tell me that you don’t use so-called AI to write your books.
Apparently Amazon is being overwhelmed by a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks. Some are rip-offs of existing books written by actual human beings, some are just vomited-up factoids about any subject the “author” thinks might attract a dollar of interest.
Amazon has introduced a daily limit for new titles as part of its response to this phenomenon.
But “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer. Programs such as Chat GPT may be artificial, but they are not intelligent.
Unless you live in a remote and cloudless corner of the Sahara Desert, all your life you will have seen clouds and marvelled at the shapes that sometimes appear: a dog, a camel, your mother in law.
You don’t (we hope) believe that some intelligence up there is trying to send you a message.
The Earth’s atmosphere is a good analogy for AI. Good, but of course no analogy is ever perfect.
Clouds are made up of billions of water droplets, and the way they look is the answer to the questions posed by the winds, rising air currents, the land or sea below.
Similarly ChatGPT, for example, carries billions of words written by humans. Your question seeds the program’s response in just the same way that particles of dust in the atmosphere seeds the clouds, creating nuclei around which droplets of water or ice form.
Naturally you won’t see an “intelligent” shape in every cloud, because the atmosphere’s “questions” are not intelligent. But the processes are very similar.
And neither of them is intelligent.
Which isn’t to say that “AI” is worthless. ChatGPT for example (other programs are available) can be a useful research tool.
A word of advice, though: When you pose a question, ask it to provide links to sources. That way you can double-check for yourself. Because AI has one thing in common with real, intelligent humans: it hates to admit to ignorance and sometimes makes up “facts”.
There is intelligence behind AI - the very clever computer boffins who created it and the cunning marketing people who persuaded us that it was intelligent. They’re probably the same people who invented the term “The Cloud” for where your data is stored. It’s not in some airy cloud at all, but in an energy-guzzling underground data centre.
*Note: No intelligence was used in the creation of the image with this piece, which was generated by the AI program Midjourney.
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