Warning: All the italicized sentences in this article were written by an artificial intelligence
“The scariest moment is always before starting. After, things can only get better ”: in a very beautiful book called On writing. Autobiography of a trade, Stephen King makes an extremely precise and effective portrait of what it means to write. And it offers a series of tips, also to avoid the fear of the blank page: one of these is to start, to leave to try to understand where things can go. Writing, whether creative or not, has always been a predominantly human activity. It is what has changed our culture, has set its rules, traditions, imaginaries.
Because writing is an act that brings together different skills, such as the ability to decipher and understand language, but also that of organizing ideas, representing them in an organic and persuasive way. In recent years, however, writing has been changing its skin.
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Lex, the Google Docs with artificial intelligence
The first part of the introduction to this article was written by a human. The second, the one in italics, no. It was composed using a web application called Lexa sort of Google Docs in the cloud with one main feature: it integrates an artificial intelligence capable of completing and writing new texts.
Lex is a project created by Every, a collective of journalists and writers which offers newsletters dedicated to topics ranging from technology to productivity. Nathan Baschez, who is the co-founder of Every, started imagining a new text editor to replace Docs last September, with an intuition: what would happen if GPT-3 were integrated insidethe artificial intelligence to write Open AI texts?
Lex was born like this: you log in with a Google account, passing through a waiting list, from the official website. And it is nothing more than a page on which you can write. The point is, typing +++ it is possible to activate artificial intelligence. The AI reads what is on the page and, based on the last words and general style, imagines what might come next, three lines at a time.
This is a feature that may not seem so revolutionary. Letting the AI complete the sentences can be a fun activity, but certainly not the solution to writing a text. But if we try to think of writing not as something static and one-off, but rather as an evolving process, something that is based on constant change and adaptation, then we may begin to understand what its true potential is.
Write together with GPT-3
Lex works quite well in Italian too, as demonstrated by the final sentences of the paragraph above. Of course, the generation of a complete text, particularly in our language, it is still cumbersome: AI is much more effective at composing small chunks of text. In short, it is quite effective in suggesting new ways, in adding sentences to a speech already written and imagined by a human being. Or maybe to rewrite it, summarize it in a few sentences or in a handful of characters.
The idea behind Lex is precisely man-machine collaboration: “I think – he wrote Baschez in an article on Every – that humans will be designing sentences and texts for a long time to come. But I also believe that we will rely on AI to get some ideas that we may not have considered. What humans do best is to collect information, synthesize it and connect it with others ideas or experiences to create something new. But it is much more difficult for us to create something out of nothing. I believe that artificial intelligence can help to have a stimulus to react to ”.
The stimulus, in this case, comes from what is probably the most advanced text completion system with artificial intelligence in the world: GPT-3, unveiled by Open AI in June 2020, is an AI that has stored all the texts produced on the Internet and is able, starting from those, to predict which could be the most likely word or punctuation after a sentence. In short, what comes out of Lex is not completely new: it is a reworking of the existing one, adapted to the user’s request. The one created by Every is not the only writing support software: there are, among others, systems such as Jasper and Copy.ai, designed specifically to support professionals in the composition of texts.
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The future of the Internet and artificial intelligence
Lex is the testimony, like other platforms such as Dall-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, of the entry into the consumer era of artificial intelligence. In short, the one in which this technology becomes available to everyone, inserted within interfaces that are easy to use even for those who are not familiar with the subject. An evolution that is destined to change our relationship with the Internet.
According to Chris Albon, director of Wikimedia’s Machine Learning division, the spread of artificial intelligence in text writing will lead to an exponential growth of content written by machines, created for advertising purposes or to scale Google’s search results. This will have a direct consequence: Internet users will go to where they know they can find humans, perhaps on Reddit or Quora or in private chats.
After all, the first contents generated by Lex are already starting to spread: YouTuber and podcaster Ali Abdal created a Twitter thread with some productivity tips entirely with AI. Content received over 1 million viewswith more than 20 thousand likes and retweets.