Is This Thing On?

Hello internet! First post and first public appearance on the web.

I’m starting this blog to dig into the intersection of two topics. The first is AI. AI as in Artificial Intelligence, which is rapidly invading every section of society. Cars are driving themselves around Arizona. You can talk to your phone and it talks back. It’s quite literally gearing up to be the new battleground for a cold war between the US and China.

The second topic is writing. Writing as in novels, poems, newspapers, emails, texts, blogs, homework assignments, whatever. It’s perhaps a less obvious trend, but AI is slowly and surely seeping into the ways we form words. If you use a predictive keyboard on your smartphone, you are using a fairly complicated piece of AI-machinery for your day-to-day communications.

It’s an increasingly active space. People are writing published novels with AI help. There are ads and movie shorts written by machine, if mainly for humor. An AI research organization just this week announced a reading and writing system they claim is too dangerous to release to the public.

Some of this is most likely hype. If you write for a living, you are probably safe for the time being. We are a long way off from a day where a machine can generate the ideas behind what we write, and it’s genuinely unclear if we will ever get there. Some of it, though, is already quite real. AI is set to make a huge impact on the publishing industry, and it’s already used by some major news outlets for basic news stories.

The plan with this blog is to broadly survey the topic of writing and AI–from the weird art, to the economic forces at play, to how the underlying AI techniques work. I’m hoping to do this in a way that is accessible to non-technical audiences. If all sounds of interest, but you don’t have the slightest idea how computer programming works, I am going to try really hard to keep things well explained.

I should definitely mention that I am not an expert in all this. I just started working in AI for my day job, and this is my first time writing something for public consumption in well, ever. I’ve been following this space for a while, and I think I’ve reached the point where I can share out some of what I’ve learned.

Let’s recap…

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