AI-Generated Stories

The mechanization of many jobs has made a considerable impact on the landscape of the workforce. With the ever-progressing improvement of quasi-artificial intelligence, even jobs that were thought to be untouchable by the advance of technology are being taken over. I wouldn’t call myself a Luddite, but I am somewhat concerned if there will be any use for humans in the workforce in the future.

In my usual smarmy fashion, I prided myself on choosing a career path that would undoubtedly be the final frontier of human capability, the last stand of ingenuity and creativity which could not be replicated by anything other than a self-aware meat sack.

I may have been too conceited in this assumption, however. In fact, it may be the case that I am on the front lines in this conflict. AI has gotten more sophisticated in recent years, to the point where algorithms can now be fed a large corpus of fictional work, and it can produce a similar piece of work inspired by the narratives it was fed.

Now, the results are often nonsensical and hilarious. The dialogue is the furthest possible thing from natural, and the algorithm appears to have little concept of things like continuity, logic, and physics (at least in the realm of fiction). A perfect example is this AI-scripted Batman comic.

While it’s clear that organic writers still have the advantage, I was struck by how funny and even witty this comic was at times. It had puns, meta-humour, and achieved a level of absurdism that could bring Samuel Beckett to climax.

I may have only found this funny because my Gen-Z brain has been fed a comedic diet that is 90% random, incoherent clauses which bear no meaning. (I blame Monty Python for starting this cultural phenomenon) Regardless, even my mother found it quite funny. It may be that comedy is the first line of defense that will crumble, because this algorithm came up with some things that were, intentionally or not, a hell of a lot funnier than many comedians.