What does it mean for a writer, such as a novelist, to have a unique “voice”? And does artificial intelligence (AI) help or hurt that voice?
Microsoft researchers set out to answer that question with a small study using 19 fiction writers, 30 readers, and short passages written with the help of OpenAI’s GPT-4. The research takes its title from a comment by one of the writers — “it was 80% me, 20% AI.”
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What prompted the study are “concerns that vast transformations of the writer economy are likely underway” as a result of generative AI, writes lead author Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang of the University of Southern California, who collaborated with five scholars from Microsoft Research Montréal. For an author, “authenticity often determines the value of their work, which co-writing with AI might potentially threaten,” the researchers say.
To better understand what “authenticity” means, Hwang and colleagues …