You write, "As professional writer I feel no threat whatever."
This calculation would seem to depend upon one's age. Those well in to their career may have limited reason for concern. Those entering a writing career may want look more carefully.
An academic philosopher who teaches for a living recently claimed that these chatbots (I believe he was referring to Jasper) can currently write credible philosophy articles at the under graduate level. He provided examples, and his claim looked about right to me.
So naturally the question arises, how long will it be until such systems can write credibly at the graduate and post graduate level? I don't claim to know, but the trend seems clear.
My own view on this is that whatever writing can be reduced to bot-able formulaics is just that "formulaic" and not what I want to see or read. It may well be that bots will conquer the art of writing term papers even at graduate level, but the real point of writing papers is not to turn out an end-product but to help students develop an ability to think for themselves. Of course there will be commercial writers put out of work by bots - writing ad copy, writing corporate brochures and many other forms of work that currently keep People employed. This is what I worry about -the death of occupations that can support writers as they do their own creative writing. But I don't believe bots are going to replace imaginative human writing ever - because what we want from stories is actual human content and specific human perspectives. I have been hearing about the "death of the book" for 40 years; yet book sales increase every year and there are more books sold and read now than at any time in the history of the world.
You write, "As professional writer I feel no threat whatever."
This calculation would seem to depend upon one's age. Those well in to their career may have limited reason for concern. Those entering a writing career may want look more carefully.
An academic philosopher who teaches for a living recently claimed that these chatbots (I believe he was referring to Jasper) can currently write credible philosophy articles at the under graduate level. He provided examples, and his claim looked about right to me.
So naturally the question arises, how long will it be until such systems can write credibly at the graduate and post graduate level? I don't claim to know, but the trend seems clear.
My own view on this is that whatever writing can be reduced to bot-able formulaics is just that "formulaic" and not what I want to see or read. It may well be that bots will conquer the art of writing term papers even at graduate level, but the real point of writing papers is not to turn out an end-product but to help students develop an ability to think for themselves. Of course there will be commercial writers put out of work by bots - writing ad copy, writing corporate brochures and many other forms of work that currently keep People employed. This is what I worry about -the death of occupations that can support writers as they do their own creative writing. But I don't believe bots are going to replace imaginative human writing ever - because what we want from stories is actual human content and specific human perspectives. I have been hearing about the "death of the book" for 40 years; yet book sales increase every year and there are more books sold and read now than at any time in the history of the world.