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I can guarantee this: No AI system would have put a headline on a column on the subject of artificial intelligence using the words “grilled cheese sandwich.”
That’s how much it’s taking to power the composition of this column. The LLM—Large Language Model—being used is in my own head. I think I’m safe in saying that no amount of Artificial Intelligence—AI—could write what I’m going to write sitting here at this very instant.
Let’s take the above paragraph for example. I used the word “composition” in the first sentence. I could have said construction or the writing of, or I could have gone way out there and used the word creation. I could have said writing this column rather than sitting here writing at this very instant.
But then I would have lost the little scene-setting that’s in what I wrote, describing myself as sitting and putting you in the action with at this very instant.
Those were choices I made that comprise what you’d call my style, I guess. I don’t think of myself as having a “style” of writing, but people have told me that I write conversationally, so I guess I’ll take that, because when I sit down to write, I think of it as talking to another person. That the other person happens to be a reader is what makes writing what it is: the transmission of ideas by arranging letters into words and sentences and putting them down on paper or, these days, on the screen of a cellphone or computer. It’s the same thing, in the end. Writing uses language to convey information, description, emotions, anger, delight, confusion—you name it, writing does it.
See that word “language” in there? I was curious about why artificial intelligence was described as coming from, or amounting to, or even being a “large language model” until I realized that it is really just a system that has gathered information in the form of language and organized it in such a way that it can be regurgitated as the second word in AI, intelligence.
It’s not intelligence, however. It’s other people’s words repositioned from the documents and information channels they were derived from into a new form that derives from an algorithm that uses previously gathered information produced by a person or a set of persons to get to a desired output or outcome. Looked at another way, it’s a fancy search engine that doesn’t just take you to source documents where information resides, but “scrapes,” an AI word that perfectly describes the process, information from those sources and puts it together for you. In other words, it’s a second step in search, in that it arranges information as well as presents it.
I’ll give you a good example: One of the big AI systems, ChatGTP or OpenAI, could have probably produced some version of what I have written in this column so far, but it couldn’t have come up with the idea for this column.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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