What AI Can Teach Us About the Myth of Human Genius

Ishiguro's book is fiction, but his suggestion that a new type of literature may be on the horizon is not. In May 2020, the San Francisco–based start-up OpenAI first publicly described its new language-processing software, which writes remarkably well. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, is one of many recent advances in AI demonstrating that machines can do many basic and not-so-basic forms of digital labor. In turn, AI's capacity for creativity--one of those supposedly sacrosanct human attributes--is becoming more and more of an existential sticking point as humans learn to live alongside intelligent machines. "Given any text prompt," the company's website says, the GPT-3 interface "will return a text completion, attempting to match the pattern you gave it." It can do this because it has been pretrained in semantic analysis by reading a huge portion of the internet.