Will machines take all the writing jobs?

16:45

The Beach

Storytelling is sometimes seen as a definitive trait; our intelligence is causal, built around narratives to explain actions and the world. But time and again, AI has moved into areas previously considered the preserve of human beings, from chess to Go, natural language processing to vision. Will machines take all the storytelling jobs? As the capabilities of the new wave of machine learning technologies has developed, so have fears around the automation it could engender. Yet to some this is overblown; the advances that have been made tend to be in closed systems, limited and data rich domains. But equally there is nothing intrinsic about writing or narration that isn’t amenable to modern machine learning approaches. What might a world, a story universe and the creative industries look like if this becomes a reality?

Michael Bhaskar

Michael is Writer in Residence at leading AI company DeepMind, the author of “Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess”, and co-founder of Canelo Publishing. He is co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Publishing.

Tom Chatfield

Dr Tom Chatfield is a British writer, broadcaster and tech philosopher. His seven books exploring contemporary culture—most recently Live This Book! (Penguin) and Critical Thinking (SAGE Publishing), researched as a Visiting Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute—are published in over two dozen languages. His first novel, an international conspiracy thriller set in the world of the dark net, will be published by Hodder in July 2019.