Wahini Vara

questioning my own assumption about myself, which is that I identify as a writer who is very invested in originality, who really wants every new book to be completely different from the previous books.

And so the fact that this AI was trained on my previous books

And could predict the style of the writing in the new book suggested that I wasn't as original as I thought, that my new book wasn't as different from the previous books as I thought.

And at the same time, on the other hand, I actually felt vindicated because I disagree with...

the other author, who is your previous guest, about the soullessness of AI-generated text.

I don't think that AI-generated text is by definition easily distinguishable from human text because of a kind of soullessness inherent in the text.

It seems like they can't and I can't myself.

And this actually gets back to what we were discussing earlier about the question of whether AI generated text is convincing or soulless.

And I think the reason

a lot of people assume AI writing is going to sound soulless is that AI companies in their most recent versions of their products have created these products that are specifically designed to sound a certain way, like a certain kind of corporate

customer service speak kind of way.

And so people think that's just what AI sounds like, right?

Like that's somehow inherently the way AI sounds, but it's not true.

AI can sound any number of ways.

So it's technically very easy actually to build an AI, to train an AI model.

That sounds human like even literary.

The reason we're not that familiar with it is that that's not what the products look like currently.

Well, research shows not only that in some cases people prefer AI-generated text to human-generated text, but also that if they're told that a piece of text is AI-generated, they become uninterested in it.

And so it seems clear that people in general, the reading public, does not want to read text generated by AI if they know that it's generated by AI.

You know, I think we focus a lot on this human technology binary on like, oh, it's weird if a machine creates the language.