The artificial intelligence that thinks it can write

The publishing industry has proven strangely resilient to the march of new technology, with only ebooks significantly disrupting a business that’s been going along in much the same way for hundreds of years.

That could be about to change, however. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3(GPT-3) is a deep-learning neural network that its creators are teaching to write like a human being.

It’s not the first time AI has been tasked with churning out fiction. Publisher JBE Books released 1 the Road in 2018, which was entirely written by a neural network, while AI-generated Harry Potter fan fiction has kept Twitter amused for years. But as anybody familiar with these works will know, AI copy is often clunky and, at times, ridiculous.

GPT-3’s big claim is that