AI and Text Generation
Geoff Davis et al.

Summary

In 'AI and Text Generation', Geoff Davis, an AI and tech researcher at the UAL Creative Computing Institute, surveys the rapid rise of AI text generators and their creative implications for contemporary writing. Introduced by Sean Clark, Davis traces the evolution from early tools such as Talk to Transformer and GPT-2 to today's large language models including GPT-4, and explains how writers use them for brainstorming, drafting, editing, adaptive storytelling and cross-disciplinary art. He illustrates the trajectory with his own early procedural story generator, the AI Creative Writing Anthology he edits, and works by artists including Mark Webster and Sasha Styles. Davis also summarises the history of rule-based expert systems, neural networks and generative pre-trained transformers, then examines ethical concerns around the sourcing of training data, copyright, employment and academic integrity, and touches on the debate over artificial general intelligence. Hosted by the Computer Arts Society at the BCS in April 2023, the talk introduces four speakers from the anthology—Tiffan Rice on environmental literacy, Ray LC on poetic reformulations, Maria Cecilia Reyes on AI as co-writer for fiction and poetry, and Shuwan on teaching with ChatGPT—each presenting a different view of human-machine collaboration in creative art, academic research and education.

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