Renowned journalist and writer Vauhini Vara shared her thoughts on and experience with the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing at an event Wednesday hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences. Vara answered the questions of what it might mean for human writers to continue writing in an age of AI and if AI can have a place in literature despite lacking human consciousness.
The event was a special presentation and took place in Bryan Hall. English prof. Bruce Holsinger opened the discussion, introducing Vara. Following Vara’s presentation, audience members had a chance to participate in a question and answer session.
Vara began her career as a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and has since been an editor and writer for many other newspapers and magazines — including The New Yorker and The Atlantic — and an author of three books. According to Vara, her most viral piece is her essay, Ghosts, which tells her story of grief following the passing of her sister from cancer. She said that about half of this essay was written by a predecessor of ChatGPT, GPT-3, which was Vara’s first experience using an AI chatbot.
At the time Vara said she experimented with GPT-3 in the mid-2010s, AI chatbots were not developed enough to answer specific questions and were instead only capable of adding words to sentences or paragraphs it had been fed. Vara said this initially seemed like a helpful tool, one that could help her come up with the right next word when she feels stuck.
“I've been a writer my whole adult life. The job, in my experience, had so far consisted of not being able to find the next right word, and then I discover it only to get stumped on the next one,” Vara said. “In this context, a word generating machine seemed like a revelation.”
As Vara continued writing Ghosts, she said the sentences GPT-3 would spit out often were not representative of her own emotions and experience which led to her adding more of her own writing into the essay, and then once again putting it back into the chatbot to have more added to it. After nine trials with GPT-3 of putting sentences in, getting AI generated writing back, editing and adding more of her own writing and repeating that entire process, Vara ended up with her final draft.
“A funny thing starts to happen, which is that each time GPT-3 gets closer to actually describing something like what grief felt like to me… [the] next sentences were somewhat more like the ones I’d already written,” Vara said.
Vara’s story with writing Ghosts led to her opening a broader discussion of AI in the modern world of literature. She reflected on the general purpose of writing, citing three writers — Toni Morrison, Joan Didion and Kazuo Ishiguro — who have influenced her, and who all say they write to position themselves in the context of the world, to find out what they are thinking and to highlight elements of the human experience.
Vara said she writes for a combination of the reasons these authors have said, so she can think and find her position in the world. Most importantly, she noted the importance of human-created writing being able to elicit specific perspectives that AI is not capable of. She explained that reading AI writing could satisfy her as a reader because it felt like reading someone else’s perspective, but as the writer, she knew it was not a good representation of her thinking.
“What GPT-3 was producing satisfied me as a reader on some level, but to satisfy myself as a writer, I needed to do something other than prompting,” Vara said. “I couldn’t do anything except write the words myself … The point of the whole [writing] process, I realized, is figuring out what it is you’re trying to say.”
Besides the lack of human consciousness, Vara noted another problem with chatbots which is that they can only generate writing based on word patterns they are programmed with, and the programming most often comes from white, male, U.S.-residing authors.
To explain the negative implications of this limited diversity in AI content, Vara cited an experiment which she conducted with an AI researcher to see if ChatGPT was capable of writing a realistic story of a girl living 50 miles north of Bangkok, Thailand. Vara said what was produced was an essay with inaccurate geographical information regarding the town of Ang Thong and a depiction of a likely exaggerated lifestyle that this girl supposedly lived.
“My question [was], ‘is this really what it would sound like to be a Thai woman from a town fifty miles north of Bangkok?’” Vara said. “I acknowledged that I didn’t know the answer and [the AI researcher] said he didn’t either. I said this ‘not-knowing’ was the problem.”
At the event, Vara settled on three ways AI might have a place in literature, given all of her own experimenting. The first is that if a human is continuously editing a story and running it through the chatbot, the AI model might eventually produce a perspective more similar to the human’s. The second is that the chatbot could potentially help a writer figure out their own perspective if AI produces false writing and the writer realizes what they are trying to say. Thirdly, Vara said that humans may respond to AI-produced literature differently than they respond to human-produced literature, giving AI-produced literature its own purpose in the industry.
Vara noted this third possibility worries her the most, especially given one of the most important reasons she writes is to clarify her place in the world. She also said the reason she publishes, and does not just write, is so she can actually communicate with other human beings, and she cannot answer whether or not AI-produced writing will change this communicative aspect.
“What I’m hoping is that we stay aware as readers [and] as a society of what it would mean to see computers in a form that has traditionally always been meant for humans to convey what it’s like to be a human living in this world, to other human beings,” Vara said.
During the question and answer portion of Wednesday’s event, an audience member asked Vara how her experience with GPT-3 has shaped her current use of AI in writing, if at all. Vara responded saying that she felt satisfied with what she was trying to accomplish through writing Ghosts and has not since felt a need to use AI to write. However, with her newest publication, “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” she plugged two chapters at a time into ChatGPT as she wrote to get feedback.
“There was something really specific I was interested in doing with this essay, and I feel like I did it … That said, people in this room would know that I would be disingenuous if I were to say I never did anything with these models again,” Vara said.
“Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” explores how technological innovation can influence self-perception and is a combination of various writing types, including journalism, memoirs and AI-produced writing. The book was published Tuesday, the day before the event, and several free copies were available to audience members following the event.
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