Role of AI in literature is topic of Ohio State lecture by Pulitzer Prize finalist

If artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and becomes capable of producing first-rate literature, will the technology eventually replace human writers? Author, journalist and professor Vauhini Vara addressed the topic during a recent lecture at The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus.

Vara spoke on Dec. 7 at Pomerene Hall as part of Ohio State’s “ART-ificial: An Intelligence Co-Lab” project, which is funded by the university’s Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Humanities and Engineering: Interdisciplinary Collaborations program.

The project included a speaker series throughout the spring and autumn semesters that was organized by Elissa Washuta, an associate professor in the Department of English, and Austen Osworth, a lecturer in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. 

“I think we need to talk at length about what these tools are for and what they’re not for and what they can do and what they can’t do and what writing is for,” Washuta said. “A lot of these things are not immediately apparent to students who are learning about writing for the first time in college. They’re having their first encounters with writing studies in college in composition classes.”

In her presentation titled “If Computers Can Write, Why Should We?” Vara discussed her relationship with AI as a writing tool. She has written for The New York Times Magazine and Wired, among other publications. She also teaches at Colorado State University as a 2023-24 visiting assistant professor of creative writing.

“In the years ahead, scientists are definitely going to work to make AI better and better and better at producing language in the form of literature,” Vara said. “I have no doubt that writers will, like I did, find it interesting and even moving to experiment with AI in their own work.”

Vara is the author of “This is Salvaged,” which was named one of the best books of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, and “The Immortal King Rao” (2022), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

“The Immortal King Rao,” Vara’s debut novel, imagines a future in which those in power deploy AI to remake all aspects of society — criminal justice, education, communication.

AI also figured prominently in Vara’s essay “Ghosts,” about her grief over her older sister’s death. She used GPT-3, an AI technology that evolved into ChatGPT, as a writing tool while composing the essay.

“Ghosts” went viral upon its publication in The Believer Magazine in 2021. The essay was adapted for an episode of National Public Radio’s “This American Life” and anthologized in “Best American Essays 2022.”

“It was more well-received by far than anything else I’d written at that point. And I thought I should feel proud of that to an extent, and I sort of did,” Vara said. “But I was also ambivalent because even though GPT-3 didn’t share the byline with me, I felt like on an artistic level, I could only take partial credit for the piece.”

In addition to casting doubt on writers’ originality, AI may replicate the blind spots of the humans who program the technology, Vara said.

“The companies behind AI models were training these models by feeding them existing texts … everything from internet message boards to Wikipedia to published books written by human authors,” she said. “The trainings have been used without the consent of the people who’ve written [the published texts]. It was also becoming clear that the models’ outputs … reflected biases, including racial and gender stereotypes.”

Though her experiment with AI resulted in a well-received essay, Vara said she has since returned to writing without technological assistance. However, she continues to explore the potential consequences of AI.

“I think it’s important to keep in mind that the publishing industry has an incentive to pursue AI-based writing in some form, being that it will almost certainly be cheaper than hiring human writers or paying human writers to produce literature,” she said.

“I do hope that as much as that’s all true, we stay aware as readers, as a society, of what it would mean to cede ground to computers entirely in a form that has traditionally been meant for humans to convey what it’s like to be human living in the world to other humans.”  

Discussions are underway to continue the “ART-ificial: An Intelligence Co-Lab” project next year, Washuta said.

“We’re hoping to see if we can continue our work together,” she said. “I think everybody who’s been involved in the planning and who’s presented has been really energized by the conversations that we’ve had.”