Travel Blog

Yesterday evening we attended a talk on AI at the Frost Science Museum in Miami. The three speakers were all from the University of Pennsylvania, which sponsored the event, and two spoke about the aspects of AI that I am most intrigued by: its application to medicine and to writing. I am all for the first and dubious about the second.

The woman who spoke about medicine only reinforced my belief in AI as a force for good, while not ignoring its (current) limitations. But the ability to access vast quantities of information in a short period of time in order to make a correct diagnosis is something that is going to help doctors, and patients, immeasurably.

The man who spoke about writing referred to a study in which students wrote a story by themselves and then one using AI. In the first instance, most of the stories were young adult stories, as those reflected the students’ experiences. When they used AI, there was much more variety: science fiction, fantasy, etc. This was seen as a good thing.

OK, but isn’t that cheating? To me, a writer using AI is like an athlete using steroids. I can envision, in the future, a writer being stripped of her Pulitzer after it’s discovered she wrote her winning novel using AI.

But could an AI-enhanced novel win a Pulitzer? Writing is personal, or at least it should be, and AI is not, at least not yet. And if it ever becomes so, we will have a problem. When I was a travel editor, rejecting lots of freelance stories, I noticed flaws that appeared again and again. And the most common, and frustrating, flaw was the absence of a distinctive voice. In fact, I used to joke that there was a machine somewhere in the country that was mass producing travel stories that all sounded pretty much the same.

And now there is – or at least there can be.