Nicolas Cole argues that AI can't replicate a writer's voice because creative writing depends on countless subjective, moment-to-moment choices driven by feelings and intentions. An AI trained on 500 pages of your work still can't know why you made each decision or reproduce the personal, often unconscious choices that make your writing yours.
People think that if you give AI enough material— I give you 500 pages of my own writing style— you will write like me. There's a lot that gets lost in that assumption, because what you're really saying is you're saying, "AI, I want you to understand the nuances of every single subjective decision that I have made in all 500 pages that I've given you, and I want you to make creative choices that are subjective the same way that I would every time." Creative writing is quite literally subjective decision after subjective decision, purely like what you are feeling in that moment. And so when you then ask AI, okay, do that, what you're really asking AI to do is to make subjective decisions the same way that you would every time. And the problem with that is A, it's subjective, and B, it assumes that when you were making the decisions, you actually knew what you were doing. And so when you ask AI to do that, you think that AI in every single individual opportunity, word word choice, paragraph, decision, everything— makes the same subjective decision that you would, which is impossible.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
