As the world continues to advance, more cutting-edge technologies are being developed. Technologies that ease life and increase productivity and efficiency. While many are receptive to these advancements, others are sceptical about them. Scepticism is quite normal, as people throughout history have grown sceptical whenever there has been an advancement in technology.
Nonetheless, the technology landscape will continue to experience a transition. Computers and word processors replaced typewriters, USB flash drives and cloud storage replaced floppy disks, smartphones replaced landlines and Email replaced fax machines. The old will always be replaced by the new.
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there have been different opinions about it. Many are receptive to it, while many are apprehensive about it owing to their beliefs that they would be replaced by AI.
In the literary landscape, this issue has been a topic of discussion among literary experts. What would be the impact of AI on the literary world? Would it erode the quality of books released? Would it improve it? Would AI replace creative writers? This was the subject of discourse at the last Lagos Book and Art Festival.
In an attempt to provide answers to these key questions, the writer, filmmaker and storyteller, Matthew Simpa, said there is a fear of AI; “a valid fear that echoes through the literary communities.” He stated that his experience has taught him that AI is not the death of creativity, it is its rebirth.
“Let me be clear, AI does not create meaning, it helps us express meaning. It cannot dream, hope or remember. It feels no heartbreak, knows no joy. What it can do beautifully is assist us in translating our uniquely human experience into words faster, clearer and more elegantly than we might have managed alone,” Simpa said.
Simpa has accepted AI and says that he writes better now that he has it than when he did not have it.
He said: “The unlimited influence of AI is not its ability to think for us, but its power to think with us.”
Simpa said that AI cannot function without human input, calling it the “craftsman’s amplifier.”
For Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, Carl Death, AI is a transformative technology and it is completely changing how we approach what we think of as intelligence, what we think of as knowledge, what we think of as learning, and what we think of as research and writing.
Carl stated that he does not use AI at all despite having written three books and edited books on them.
“From this position of limited, explicit engagement with AI, I think I approach it from a perspective of critical concern. I want to acknowledge and recognise the transformative and potential, progressive opportunities and benefits from AI, but I also think we need to think and reflect quite carefully on what some of the limitations and biases and implications for that might be,” Carl said.
He stated that AI is a transformative technology like other technologies before it, like the Internet, the printing press, the laptop, and even books.
He emphasised that these have had revolutionary impacts on how we produce and consume ideas, knowledge and stories. He added that these have also been subject to moral panics.
“The concept of the moral panic about new forms of technology is an interesting one to reflect on in this respect. The printing press itself was thought by some to herald the breakdown of social fabric and lead to potential revolutions… the rise of mass-published paperback fiction was also lamented by many at the time for how it would corrupt and cheapen the reading habits of the broader population,” Carl said.
He added that AI surely would have huge implications on how we produce and consume the written word and that we should “be wary of falling into an approach where anything new and transformative and powerful is automatically rejected.”
Carl said that at the University of Manchester, they try to teach students about the legitimate and illegitimate ways of utilising AI tools. He added that it is appropriate for students to use AI tools to give them the initial steer on what to read, and that they would have to go and read the literature.
“AI tools are not a substitute for reading that literature…” he said.
He spoke on his concerns in the area of teaching, learning, research and critical thinking, saying that it is a challenge trying to convey to students the importance of a profound understanding of materials that they are engaging with, beyond simply typing in questions to an AI tool.
“The problem for many of our students, at least those who feel that ChatGPT or other tools can give them a shortcut route to the correct answer is that a day, a week or a month later, their knowledge on that topic may well have disappeared. Because they haven’t internalised and examined that level of knowledge,” he stated.
Multidisciplinary professional and founder of Legacy Bridge Publishing, Esther Dumbiri, said, “we are living in a defining moment where we have a collision of technology and creativity, adding that just like any innovation that comes, AI is a two-edged sword.”
Dumbiri argued that though creativity matters in this age of Artificial Intelligence, originality becomes a problem.
“So, AI changes everything, it’s where we are today, which makes even our missions as publishers even more urgent. We can’t just accept publishing everything and anything anymore. Now, when anybody can go online and say, ‘Okay, write me a book on how to get rich in 10 days’, AI will produce that book for you. And someone else comes and says, “Write me a book on how I struggled in ten years to build wealth’. Those two books are different,” Dumbiri said.
She said that many of these books might not carry the weight of human experience, lacking the essence of what they are trying to communicate. She added that publishers should look out for. “And that is what we as publishers should be looking out for… what stories are we putting out there? Are we putting out yet another string of letters? Or, are we putting out true, lived experiences of people who are willing to change other people’s lives with the things they have gone through?” She added.
Dumbiri also stated that AI has not killed originality, adding that it can bring humans’ ideas to life.
Writer and software developer, Dele Sikuade, stated that there is no intelligence in AI, and that what we currently have is called machine learning.
He states that the holy grail would be having Artificial General Intelligence. He said that this AGI is the real AI, adding that it cannot be told anything and it would genuinely be smarter than humans. He said: “…The AI of today is made from the machine that is either on or off, which is not how the human brain works… today’s AI is not able to produce anything that is actually original… and that is because it constantly does what it does, far superior to a human in its ability to reach out and bring you data. From that, it can understand and bring back story structures.”
Sikuade said that, though AI is not intelligent but it is a fantastic tool and people should use it. “So this is the reality of AI today. It’s not intelligent, but it’s very powerful. It’s a fantastic tool, you should use it. It can reach and produce knowledge… but, if you don’t give it the tight constraints of a very clever prompt, it’ll reach too much knowledge. And the knowledge that it reaches is contradictory, and then it gets lost,” he said.
He added that AI has a lot of power to reduce costs in publishing, and it can read through all kinds of things. Sikuade stated that we need to be wary of AI even as we make use of it.
