AI for writers: Creativity gets a booster dose

Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea, which got him the Nobel Prize, was translated into nine languages within a year after the original work was published in English in 1952. None but the original English version was written by Hemingway.

Things could have been different if Hemingway was alive today. The Nobel laureate could have penned down all versions of his masterpiece himself, embedding local cultural contexts, nuances, flavours as he would have deemed fit to each of the languages. He could have written his masterpiece in many other languages catering to a much larger market.

The very idea would have sounded like a big joke if proposed back then. What seemed impossible or a distant dream, is a reality today—thanks to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that is fast evolving.

Not just that. A creative mind like Hemingway could have written many more novels, in addition to all the ones he had written and published, within the timeframe of this work life.

Creative collaboration

AI tools are no longer restricted to automation of manufacturing works. The advent of generative AI has transformed many industries, including the ones that have always been solely dependent on human creativity. What was initially considered as ‘garbage in; garbage out’ is today flipped to ‘garbage in; treasure out’ with creative collaboration between humans and the machines they have built.

For writers and storytellers, AI today simply enhances efficiency and accuracy, eliminates confusions with grammar and spellings, detects possible plagiarism, among others. Today, a writer can write in more than one style, unlike old days; and write in as many languages he may wish to.

Before generative AI, writers were just writers. They could not produce, they could hardly promote. Today, it simply takes a few clicks for a writer to turn his story into a full-blown audio-visual show. that simply saves his time that he would have had to dedicate for the age-old production process.

In other words, AI is freeing up time and mind-space for writers to engage more in what he is passionate about.
Truth is, AI has emerged as an active catalyst that is augmenting human creativity. AI can assist writers by suggesting plot twists, generating dialogue, or creating entire scripts based on a set of parameters. Even it helps writers to add local flavours to their original story to make that more relevant for a particular geography or a language.

Today, even a writer can come up with his own set of music, sound effects and even visual effects to produce shows himself in a way he pleases to present the story.

Streamlining the Writing Process

The writing process has always been time-consuming and labour-intensive. Pre-writing research usually takes a lot more time than the writing itself, besides other things. With AI, most associated, rather mundane, works can be streamlined. Confusions of grammar and spelling have become things of the past. So is fact checking and even context research that today’s advanced AI tools can do efficiently and very quickly saving time for the writers.

AI-powered personal writing assistants can adapt to individual writing styles and preferences, offering tailored suggestions that align with the writer’s style and tonality of writing.

What’s the Writer’s Block?

Writer’s block has longest been a common, and probably the biggest, challenge for many writers. With AI, that’s easy to pass through. AI writing tools can generate prompts, suggest sentence completions, and even produce entire paragraphs based on a few keywords or a brief outline. To add to that, AI can simulate brainstorming sessions by generating a wide range of ideas and possibilities.

While AI can mimic many aspects of human creativity, it certainly lacks emotions, nuances, local cultural contexts and depth that comes with lived experiences. What AI can do is help humans to work better, work faster and enhance creativity, but not be original enough to replace humans.

Truth is, it’s called ‘artificial intelligence’, not ‘authentic intelligence' for a reason. AI only acts as an enabler, while the essence of creativity remains a human endeavour that can certainly be augmented with the help of AI. The human touch that brings empathy, intuition, lived experiences would always be irreplaceable—at least in the foreseeable future.

Views are personal. Prateek Dixit is the co-founder and CTO of Pocket FM.