My children are not AI – #4 They both tell stories.

My 5-year-old boy loves stories. We’ve read books to him every day from a very early age, he’s been listening to recorded stories for hours and he keeps playing with his imaginary friends, having built a whole universe around his fantasy gang. From time to time, I also participate, bring ideas and act as characters in his stories. One evening, he started making jokes about nonsense trees, like ketchup trees, potato fries (chips) trees or teeth trees. The latter made him laugh so much and he started making a story about babies coming to pick and choose their teeth on those trees. He was probably inspired by his little brother who’s got his first teeth at the moment. The story was not elaborate and completely absurd, but I found it original and quite funny. So, I thought “My son is a genius! He has so much imagination! AI will never be able to be as creative, or… can it?”

I decided to ask ChatGPT to create a story about teeth growing on trees. In a few seconds, it generated me a 50-lines story, full of magic, well structured, extremely well written with fantasy characters and locations. I was quite taken aback. What is left to be created by this generation if AI can write beautiful stories in a few seconds? Then I looked again and more carefully at ChatGPT story. It was about unusual things growing on trees, but the fact that it was teeth was not really relevant. Then I asked ChatGPT to create a story with balloons and chairs growing on trees. Names of fantasy characters and locations were different (the forest was not called Grinwood but Baloonia or Chairwood), but the stories were almost identical. Then, when I’ve asked my son about baloontrees and chairtrees, I got 2 other stories, maybe not well structured, not with beautiful words, but they had the merit to be original and different to each other.

Generative AI are not meant to innovate, even if it looks like it at first sight. It creates the most probable content in a defined context based on the zillions of data it has been exposed to. And it works! AI today can create something new, not original, not always great, but still, something that didn’t exist as it was in the first place. This is how it can tell stories, but also create music, artwork and even cooking recipe like these littles biscuits (in French) or these apps helping you cook a meal out of left overs in your fridge. A lot of what we create is inspired by what we’ve already listened to, seen or tasted, and so is it for AI too.

What if we, the humans, just stop creating new things ourselves and let AI do it for us? Our culture will certainly stagnate, standardize and we’ll end up reading, listening, and tasting more and more of the same. Studies have been run to try anticipate what would happen if we let AI learn more and more from synthetic data, i.e. data generated by AI. This is what will certainly happen with generative AI trained with data taken from the internet in the next few years, as the internet content is more and more fed by AI – Remember my first article? 90% of the internet will be generated by AI by 2030. This article from Futurism explains how generative AI is getting MAD (Model Autophagy Disorder) after 5 iterations of training with synthetic data. The author, Maggie Harrison explains:

“When trained repeatedly on synthetic content, say the researchers, outlying, less-represented information at the outskirts of a model's training data will start to disappear. The model will then start pulling from increasingly converging and less-varied data, and as a result, it'll soon start to crumble into itself.”

So, I keep encouraging my son to tell nonsense fictional stories, sing and play out-of-tune and weird songs, draw colorful and peculiar pictures, cook his own spicy-bitter-sweet-salty-sour  hardly edible mixtures and so much more to let him express his creativity. Because, more than ever in human history, this generation will need to be creative, to think out-of-the box, to dare to experience and test new things. And in combining human creativity with AI’s ability to structure, formulate, design or assemble, there has never been more opportunities for humans to thrive and create something beautiful.