The end of creativity? What OpenAI's new chatbot can, and cannot, do

Last week OpenAI released ChatGPT, a new general-purpose chatbot built from a large language model. While I am usually quite sceptical about big claims in the AI field, I must say I am impressed by the many things this product can do -- to the point that I wonder if it will be a game-changer in the way we write on a daily basis.

Despite being designed as a conversational agent, ChatGPT feels more like a performer. Sure, it can follow the dialogue with the user - which is a remarkable feature - yet the fun part begins when you start poking at it with "creative" tasks where it has to generate a bit of text.

Do it with style

ChatGPT generates text starting from a few prompt lines you provide. The cool thing is, you can decide the "flavour" or style of the text and ChatGPT will deliver it while elaborating on your input in a creative way. Combinations are infinite:

Twitter was flooded with remarkable results. People have been writing Bohemian Rhapsody parodies, gangster-style code explanations and the list goes on.

While these may be seen as impressive yet silly amusing exercises, I think there is a large number of situations where this kind of technology can assist us -- namely, writing boring stuff.

Goodbye, boilerplate text

In coding jargon, boilerplate code is a sequence of instructions you have to write most of the time, to set things up or to perform common operations. Boilerplate code is always the same and requires zero creativity: it's a must-do, and as such, coders try to automate it as much as possible.

The same concept holds true for natural language. Text communication is often required to exhibit a certain shape to be perceived as adequate or fit for purpose: recommendation letters, cover letters, complaints, abstracts, and even adverts or tweets nowadays need to be in a recognisable structure to be successful.

Unless you are granted a certain freedom on how to express yourself, writing these kinds of documents can be uninspiring at best. This looks like the perfect example of the type of repetitive task that we would like machines to do in our place!

The chatbot paradox

Interestingly enough for a machine, while being great at mimicking, ChatGPT is less successful at logic and reasoning: it fails to draw a general rule to follow. It is capable to write nice haikus for example, but it doesn't really count the syllables:

Or you may ask it to replace a letter with another, but the results are hit-and-miss. Here is an alternative haiku:

Funnily enough, ChatGPT fails to consistently do the easy, mechanical bit (replacing a letter, counting the syllables). This shows how it is still failing at building a model of the world (what is a haiku? What is a syllable? What is a letter?) to act upon.

Most likely, the crucial next step towards achieving "intelligent" success is addressing this issue. At the moment, though, I would say ChatGPT is capable of generating custom text reasonably well for lots of use cases while keeping track of the conversation; not to mention its other impressive abilities typical of large language models, such as text translation or summarization.

Is it the end of creativity?

The ability to instantly produce "good enough" text is becoming more and more appealing, as models get better at producing useful, grounded pieces of text rather than open-ended, mostly random stories. As technology advances, we may be able to generate high-quality essays, reports or even lyrics and poems with just a few words of prompt.

I wonder if we are headed to a future where we, as humans, only know how to express our communication needs crudely, without any sense of style or form. What about arts -- art is all about form, right? We could eliminate writers and painters and let the AI deal with the form: unlimited novels and pictures that look exactly how we want.

Personally, I think true art is more about the artist rather than the work of art. I want to see another human performing and creating things, to establish a sort of communication, to know that we are sharing the same world, and the same feelings. Art is, ultimately, the best way we've found to find relief from our human nature. I doubt even the smartest chatbot will be able to do that anytime soon.

Parts of this text were edited with ChatGPT. The bot in the cover image was generated with stable diffusion.