One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. “AI is really good at the lower levels. It’s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical. But, the higher up you go, the less good it is.” The arc of a story is particularly hard for AI to get convincingly right.
“If you’ve got an AI to write a narrative, it can do a pretty good job of having a sequence of events and something happen at the end. But it wouldn’t be a very tellable narrative,” he continues. “Nothing startling or interesting would happen. And if there is anything startling, it will generally look like a mistake, rather than a brilliant twist.”
The secret sauce of great writing remains secret – even to the academics who study it. “Linguists don’t understand, really, how language works at its higher levels,” at the level of discourse, storytelling, enchantment. “We can’t build a machine to do something when we don’t know how it works.” We do have some idea of what it might boil down to – and that’s our fundamentally social natures and, tied in with that, the fact that we are “wetware” – human flesh, with its spikes of adrenaline, rushes of dopamine, craving for social contact, all of which find expression in language’s structure and the way we use it.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/jul/04/future-of-fiction-next-great-novel-ai-language-chat-gpt
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