LAHORE: A panel discussion on the “Future of the written word in the age of AI” was held at Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) on Sunday.

AFP News Editor for Afghanistan and Pakistan Emma Clark moderated the session while panelists include author Monica Ali, essayist and humorist David Sedaris, author Mohsin Hamid and novelist, poet and playwright Hannah Dubgen.

Ms Clark argued that artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important development of our time. AI driven apps can give answers on everything and one can write an essay, news article and an entire novel. It can be disaster for creativity and literature Ms Ali shared her experience with AI apps which changed the style of writing. She said she used some tools and was asked to write a paragraph on love marriage.

“I experienced ChatGPT and found it poor and not great. It produces pseudo writing and its style tone is not good. People are using it and a lot of genre writers are also using it to speed up writing and work. It cannot write a novel as the brain does about style and feeling, etc,” she said.

Mr David called ChatGPT “immoral” and said that it will cut all the jobs.

Mr Hamid said AI can learn but needs guidance. AI is here for a while and it promotes machine culture.

He said machine culture is binary as it decides things in black and white. He said that his children were caught doing homework using AI apps as they did not have a major in English but in chemistry and physics and people are letting them do it. “We are seeing machine culture instead of human culture for different jobs.”

Ms Dubgen talked about AI and Art and disregarded AI. We now recognize what is human and what is machine but one day we will not be able to distinguish whether we are talking to the human or machine.

She said we want to be loved by humans not machines and we have morality and she also created some questions about AI which bring positive things. She said AI was enforced in art and it failed to address the issues.

Ms Ali said that no one should be forced to use AI tools to work and they should try it and could use its research tools, multilingual words, translate, re-translate and how to include it in work.

David termed the AI writing as 8th grader. He said artists were creating audio books for living in America but AI was using it.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2024