Generative Writing and the Future of Creativity

My dear friends from various circles asked if ChatGPT will overtake human creativity and pose a danger to creativity, the essential human element that distinguishes it from other animals and machines. I gave the question a lot of thought before deciding to write this article. I hope that this will add a drop to the growing ocean of curiosity.

For this article, let's think of ChatGPT as a verb for LLM-powered generative writing, text-to-image, text-to-music, and eventually text-to-everything tools, as well as the interaction of text-to-sound, text-to-touch, or vice versa, which we're talking about under the name ChatGPT (even though ChatGPT, the noun, the algo, and product is proprietary to open.ai).?

The nature of threat defines the scale of opportunity

Let’s start with the question: Will ChatGPT limit human creativity and potential?

I don't think ChatGPT will make people less creative in the long run. It's just a different (soft) machine. People and machines have been working together for more than three millenniums, but this time the machine learns faster and from every other machine and interaction. As a result, it scales 100x to 1000x, but it still only learns as much as the sum of all human interactions. Even though people will still decide what comes next, machines, in this case, generative writing, will be able to speed things up much more quickly.?

The tech transformation not being discussed

LLM-powered generative writing and generative art also bring a fundamental cloud transformation. Historically, the cloud was used for managing the compute-data-storage efficiency, but now it becomes forever-learn-transformer learning at the speed of milliseconds, and that has mind-boggling possibilities. Every industry where knowledge is transformed, well every industry needs that, would have use cases for learning at lightening need and even more transform existing processes.

If the advent of PCs and then mobiles, made every human a typist, and typist was a paid profession, just two generations ago, generative writing would eventually make every human master the art of “effective prompts” and the mastery of these would be facilitated with tools above the hood, and not by ChatGPT. Like in the classic OSI model, the application and presentation layer got detached from other layers (physical, data link, network, transport, and session), and within a few quarters, the power of generative content would trigger from every other presentation and application layer across most SaaS applications and apps.?

Creativity is in the question?rather than the answer

Human evolution is a response to creative questions and sincere, often multi-generational, and multi-civilizational, quests to find the answers. That’s true with ChatGPT, it is as good a tool in your hand as your ability to use it. And this machine or bot is not used by muscle memory but by neural memory. The smarter is your ability to think and connect, and the better is your ability to scientifically describe, call it to parametrize, the better is your ability to create or communicate.

So, from a communication or creativity point of view, the ability to parameterize and connect opens up not thousands or millions of ways, but a billion and trillion ways, and to use all of them, you need the enormity of human creativity. And humans are born creative, so getting the next trillion prompts, and building transformers and guided workflows around them is just part of the next wave of creative evolution.

Writing is more than writing, it’s thinking, visual thinking

This brings us to the next part of the contention around whether ChatGPT will stifle human creativity. I believe, the answer is a firm 'no'. It will only make it stronger.

Creative thinking, especially when it comes to content or communication, is the ability to think, speak, write, draw, or make something, like a writer, poet, painter, digital artist, or marketer.

This kind of creativity is now more rich text (visually experiential content) and more immersive than ever. Even though a visual says more than a thousand words, good captions tie together thousands of visuals, and marketing uses both the power of words and visuals with the hyper-personalized omnichannel delivery models to influence the final customer. All aspects of creative communication in create-enhance-deliver-optimize-brand scenarios need human imagination and handling the paradox, where you break the rule book to create the rule book. In the new era, visual thinking would even speed up.

ChatGPT, in itself, does not upset the creativity bandwagon. It’s the many tools that will use ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and evolving models, that help you stitch your story together from thinking to constructing that will define new models, and users of these tools will become the new winners. I foresee creativity being amplified at every step in the creative process. Tools will provide the following:

1.????What to write: Discovery of text creatives, winning lines, filtered in thousands of ways: slogans, captions, titles, headings, lyrics, songs, proverbs, idioms, adages, quotes, bio, recommendations, reviews, notifications, dialogs, memes, jokes and so on.

2.????Expand creative research: Having selected the type of creative that fits the creative journey, research keywords, collocations, sentence structure, grammar, parts of speech, and hashtags in the context of things, services, brands, products, feelings, emotions, sentiments, and traits, and optimize them to common marketing needs to fit in user profile demography, interest, background, pricing point, value system, and awareness.

3.????Plan the intent/output: Use the combination of creative discovery to create desired intent as long-form content (blogs, essays, white papers, reports), mid-form (short posts, FAQs), short form (social media posts, slogans, email/presentation headings) and have a workflow-based structure that evolves your writing through discovery, selection, generation, and human editing.

4.????Edit for creativity, iterate for value: Have the ability to edit and add value at all levels, word (including creating new words), line, para, page, and article. Able to paraphrase, edit, expand, contract, stylize, write inspired (by humans, URLs, or files), polish, translate, be bilingual, etc.

5.????Rich text next content: Immerse visuals in text or use visuals to find text. Have these visuals, uploaded, selected from free galleries, micro-stock sites, or created by generative art. Ability to select visuals such as hero images, thumbnails, icons, and the ability to add text and branding elements in generative images.

6.????Writer for a designer, and designer for a writer: Ability to suggest text for an image, image for text, HTML tags, hashtags, all on the fly.

7.????Expand, repurpose, scale: Do text repurposing in search, social, shopping, or branding needs, with the same ease as layout republishing in images.

8.????Experiment for creativity: Iterate above from audience fitment and impact as needed by your intent or KPIs. Use the iteration to make the crawler (keywords on the web, hashtags on social, product/brand name services, and their feature-price point mapping in shopping) aware.

9.????Establish your brand: Adding brand and team sharing on group generative writing that is tested, reviewed, and plagiarized-free)

10.??Tap into human emotions like never before: Adding more elements of human reception where how people read or view, or share or subscribe, are factored as intuitive elements in the creation of new content, rather than just copying what works in some other scenario or product blindly.

11.??And the holy grail: get closer to the desired goal to find the perfect companion text for an image or perfect image for the text.

The hump in generative writing

Generative writing often creates “correct (sometimes debatable) looking good but boring” content, and the sophistication to make such content lively, personalized, and responsive to community feedback is a journey that tools built on top of generative writing are working on or will continue to work upon. You don’t realize the essential boring nature of “creative” content unless you have made a few hundred queries or already know what’s best, because till then the initial wow wins.

Why is ChatGPT content very well packaged and yet boring?

It lies in the principles of generative writing that defaults to the highest probability model to find the next word or phrase as learned from all available sources it is trained upon. The volume of everything is acceptable or most repeatedly mediocre. The class (phenomenal unique content) breaks the rules and defines the new rules, and the class often does not have the mass to influence generative writing results. And generative writing algorithms don't have the intelligence to sense class from the mass as it lacks the intuitive nature of human beings. If you don't train generative writing on categorized classes in unique workflows (well, that might be my next article), the content will be standard, which might mean boring.

We will witness the emergence of a plethora of novel tools or innovative workflows within the existing popular tools, aimed at

(a) Query Multidimensionality: Transforming dull generative content into imaginative content, facilitating the many ways to make queries multidimensional, specific, stylish, and relevant, and offering a diversity of a way to think, while adapting to any available or actively used style.

(b) Size-intent optimizing: Offering greater human control to unlock creativity, research, or changes at an unprecedented pace. Stitching the ability to see from word to line to para to page and back to words when required; and then allowing the ability to replace any part, word/line/para, not just with text but with image, video, audio as required.

(c) Writer-Meets-Designer-Meets-Marketer: Facilitating the convergence of left and right brain thinking to foster the growth of both logical and creative faculties. Ability to think with visual context as much as text. Ability to be influenced by mood, emotion, and object detection, captured by photos or videos, and adopt generative content in run time mode.

(d) Adaptive content: Adopt to the reviews; today’s generative content is essentially one-to-one, but soon it will have one-to-many (though a few one-to-many pretensions are already sprouting there more for the education of prompts) and many-to-many situations allowing for collaborative editing and thinking, and even evolving where users and owners can create and edit within defined rules parameters. You can even facilitate review prioritizing of conflicting comments sequenced by generative writing as different options of convergence or divergence.

These cutting-edge tools will be the actual battlefield where software creators will vie for supremacy and influence for the next hundred billion dollars market. Thousands of patents await technologists on this journey, while countless opportunities are opening up for creative minds to elevate their craft using these tools.

Speed + Quality at every touchpoint = Success

I believe communication as a whole won't be affected, but the process of making communication magic will forever change, and because of that communication will be affected as players will change. Soon, marketing managers can think like advertising agencies, but advertising agencies will still move their creative vision forward. The speed of reviews can be sped up, and many more quality review parameters can be added as "creativity? can be measured on a large scale. Eventually, a new paradigm on the line "Creative Authority" will emerge, which, like "domain authority," will reward people and teams with the best relevant creativity, which will be recognized and celebrated, and amplified across search, social, and shopping needs for branding on one side, and entertainment, inquiry, and relationship needs on the other.

Final Thoughts

The speed with which consumers react to marketing depends not only on how quickly content was created, with impeccable quality but also on how quickly they can understand and relate to it. Generative writing can speed up the production of content by a factor of 100, but people will need time to learn to engage with it as other factors evolve in the coming decades. The future of writing and design may be influenced by many of these other factors, but none of them can afford to ignore generative writing or art anymore.

The worry of the average human tasks being displaced would still not go away, even if that was always happening all the time. We have wrongly equated the replacement of human tasks by machines with the replacement of humans; rather, it is the evolution of humanity. The problem is when access to change is limited, costly, prohibitive, or restrictive to one set at the cost of another. As long as the broader intent of change stays in course of maximum gain, I guess we will be served right.

I, for one, find myself in the thick of those questions, but more excited than ever! I think it's thrilling that we're on the cusp of discovering how to make a few billion people more innovative and productive than ever before. I have faith in humanity's potential to shine, and I'm confident that the myriad of changes brought on by cutting-edge technology will only serve to highlight the brilliance and beauty of the human mind.

I am open to questions and further discussions online and offline.