Why we need literary work from writers!

 Why we need literary work from writers!

                        "I spake", said Jar-Jar Binks.

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent", said Qui Gon.

I've recently used and experienced one of the very popular and highly advanced technological models which is taking the world by a storm - Chat GPT. As a computer science student, I must state my amazement at how much development has taken place in the field of AI in order to achieve this feat - this absolutely mind-boggling piece of technology that has the ability to write human-like things by itself. Though chatbots have been around for ages, this is truly a revolution in what it means for a non-living, non-human, software system to generate such life-like conversational messages.

My curiosity was at its peak as I played around with it for a while, bombarding it with all sorts of questions. What was funny was that an AI-model was verifying my existence as a human before proceeding with the prompt section! The most interesting and slightly panic-inducing feature I noticed was its ability to write about nearly anything on its own, having analyzed human thoughts and speech patterns from several sources. "This is indeed the true power of what AI has to offer", I thought. I asked it to write poems about sea otters and pelicans, about the world and its oceans, about climate change and world peace. There was no dearth as to how creative and perfect these poems seemed, with their flawless grammatical structure and rhyming synonyms, with simple phrases yet powerful connectivity and messages in them. 

But it got me thinking hard. Is this the end of what it means for humans to write? Is this the end of the human era of genius to communicate through text?

Fortunately, in my own understanding of why I appreciate being human, I would like to believe that the answer to that is a strong, definite, bold No.

Well, imagine this for instance: What happens when you start putting random words together, just cramming in all sorts of words from the dictionary? There is a very high probability that you've managed to generate a few lines of text which certainly have letters and words from a language, but they can never become sentences. A huge collection of these textual lines will never be a paragraph or an essay for that matter, since it will most likely be missing several important grammatical requirements for the human mind to comprehend the meaning of what's being conveyed. 

Why do you think humans would have felt the need to start communicating through a written medium when just sounds from their mouth indicating certain objects or situations would have sufficed? Why would they have developed a visual and symbolic representation of what they wished to convey, marking their historical presence in the form of cave paintings (with symbols), stone tablets and palm-leaf manuscripts?

Imagine another scenario while you are at it: You're a generally creative and well-spoken person admired for your ideas and your ability to communicate. But in this particular moment, you're dreadfully bored and weary. You've got an essay on creative writing to be handed in tomorrow, and for whatever unknown reason which is completely unlike you, you've put it off until the very last moment. So, gathering every bit of motivation and reminding yourself that the grade accounts for a tenth of your course, you sit down and start typing away. You've got a topic to research on, you look up various sources, you collect and analyze all the points you have and you've managed to complete it before the deadline. And to account for all the hard work and effort you've put in, you've managed to get a very good grade for your submission. Despite having completed the task, you know deep down that this essay wasn't your best effort. You could have done a much better job which didn't lack a personal touch and your sense of identity in it, a stamp of something having been written by you. 

Before I get back to my reason for mentioning the above situations, here's what Chat GPT answered when it was asked if it was alive (according to an article on https://mashable.com/article/what-is-chatgpt):

"No, I am not alive. I am an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI, I do not have consciousness or feelings. I am just a computer program designed to respond to text inputs and generate outputs based on patterns in the data I was trained on."

Here's why I've asked you to think of those scenarios and for my very confident answer earlier: I appreciate writers and authors for brewing magic with their words and ideas, the delicate representation of different situations. But these literary works are much more powerful to read and enjoy as they are written by "an entity which has the capacity to feel". Whenever we read books, a brilliant sonnet or a novel, what I feel distinguishes it from the "exquisite" work of an artificial model is that it was written by someone who has a deep connection with wanting to share their ideas and the notion of understanding they've had with the people around them. Whenever someone writes that way, immersing their soul and their experiences, they tend to preserve a part of themselves and their personality in the delicates pages of their work. There is a finer level of consciousness and clarity with which people communicate, and on a deeper level it is all for having that sense of connection, of having gone through similar phases in life.

I feel that this sense of "personal attachment" or "having written from one's perspective", and an "overall understanding of how attached they are with their ideas" can never be replicated by a non-human entity despite however advanced it may be. Most of us prefer reading material which we can associate with our daily lives, with whatever we've been feeling. There is no greater joy than reading something which tends to explain how you're feeling or whatever you've faced better than an author who understands the same. We don't just amalgamate the sentences which have the correct context and meaning, we also focus on adding  our own knowledge and understanding, our visions and encounters, and ultimately, we tend to add a part of ourselves into what we write. Our compositions tend to reflect our identities and characteristics.

Though I am proud of people for having developed this remarkable technology which keeps improving itself in trying to imitate human conversations and writing skills, and its ability in trying to string together beautifully described sentences, I believe it would never be able to do so in the human way, having never experienced what it means to be human before.