Towards the end of May, an Ontario judge rejected the documents of a defense lawyer, suspecting that his argument contained cases of fictitious case law, invented by text -generating tools, which are now called hallucinations of artificial intelligence (AI)1.
Isolated case? Less and less.
A few weeks ago, a consultant sitting next to me on the train spent hours copy and paste of the text generated by Chatgpt in a professional presentation. However, I have not seen if she also asked for AI to determine how to invoice her client.
Everyone has anecdotes like that, even in the context of romantic encounters.
Last year, Roman Khaves, co -founder of Rizz, told the CBC that the AI assistant he created helps to provide text to break ice on dating applications2. Rizz now has 10 million users.
What do these common examples have? Writing.
While we constantly debate the impact of AI on productivity, employment, education, GDP, energy resources, remedies against cancer, and even the first trillionaire in the making, I sometimes wonder something simpler: what a world will look like a world will lose its value, now that we all have access to our own robotic version Cyrano de Bergerac ?
Writing has existed for thousands of years, first on stone and clay, then on papyrus and paper, and today on our screens. Since its inception, writing and thought have been feeding each other. For my part, it is often by writing that my ideas become clearer because the writing work opens the way to solutions.
In this new world where AI writes everything, writing also loses its function as an evaluation tool.
First, there is the education system, but think of all letters of intention, subsidy requests, pitch And presentations that may transform into simple symbolic formalities, repeated actions out of habit, but less and less significant. The human resources of large companies already use AI to sort CVs … which are increasingly written by the AI itself. We get lost.
What is all the more useful with writing is that the style tells us as much as the content, if not more. A boss who sends an email without punctuation is too in a hurry for you, a lover unable to combine his verbs in a text will not take you out at the opera, and so on.
If you have the misfortune to have to use LinkedIn for your professional functions, you have probably noticed all these perfect publications with impeccable grammar, and in both official languages apart! Perfect, but all more uniform and monotonous than each other since they are literally written by robots.
What will happen to the writing and the field of creativity in general in the AI era?
A few months ago, the rather apocalyptic anticipation scenario AI 20273imagined by specialists, has made a lot of attention on the imminent arrival, according to them, of superintendent. As some of their predictions envisage the end of the human species, you will understand that the future of writing does not prevent them from sleeping. Here are some fictitious predictions of my vintage, to have fun:
Early 2026 : Almost all publishing houses and publications have the authors sign the declarations of non-use of AI, without having ways to verify them.
November 2026: The Goncourt winner accepts his prize and, with the aim of foaming sales even more, admits to having used the AI to write a whole chapter, without saying which one.
December 2026: New more precise studies continue to demonstrate that the use of AI contributes to a decrease in brain activity4.
Early 2027: Netflix released its first series entirely written by AI. It is neither the best nor the worst.
May 2027: To celebrate the 64e Anniversary of his album The Freewheelin’Bob Dylan announces that he has sold the posthumous rights of his voice to his record company who will be able to continue to get out of the albums on his behalf in an indefinite manner. Teams will perpetuate his work, a bit like James Bond films or Chanel collections.
Summer 2027: A successful writer of Romatasy launches a challenge on Tiktok: “From tomorrow, I will publish one novel per week for 52 weeks. Are you going to be able to read me fast enough? »»
I discussed all this recently with my friend Julien Vallée, the tandem of directors Vallée Duhamel, who explores AI for his video productions (go see what they are doing on their social networks!).
These are tools that allow us to push our ideas later.
Julien Vallée, from the tandem of directors Vallée Duhamel
No money to film a flying bentley on fire that crosses the desert? No problem, AI takes care of minimal costs.
According to Julien, we enter a time when the most precious competence is a mixture of imagination and critical meaning: knowing what to create, but also what to keep.
For the moment, he is right since AI is not really “creative”. Text generating tools predict the following word according to probabilities, without real understanding or intention.
As a creator, the tool is great if we use it to “push” our ideas. For example, when I work on a fictional text, I “brainstorm” with AI and ask him to criticize my ideas and identify the flaws. Of course, it is up to me to decide what I remember, especially knowing that sometimes small imperfections bring authenticity to a work.
Authenticity is also a question that deserves its own paper. For those who have already taken art history lessons, you will remember the notion of “aura” by Walter Benjamin, which tries to explain why an original painting is different from a simple reproduction.
If you read a novel that makes you cry, would your emotion be less legitimate if this book had been written by a robot?
A book like Things in Nature Merely Grow From Yiyun Li, who talks about his mourning after the suicides of his two sons, which occurred at eight years apart, can only be written by a human being?
Can AI “hallucinate” a human experience?
A hallucination is a phenomenon linked to alterations of perception in the brain. Technically, a machine cannot hallucinate. When we speak of the hallucination of AI, we should rather speak of the work of a counterfeiter who “paraphrase the real”, to use Mathieu Bélisle’s formula. A counterfeiter who has learned to imitate us by changing, among other things, hundreds of thousands of books.
When the era arrives where it will be impossible to distinguish the work of an author from that of a robot (if we are not already there), the question of writers will become the same as that of humanity: how will we succeed in standing out?
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1. Read the text “The” Hallucinations of AI “are invited in the courts” on the Radio-Canada site
2. Read the text “from ai dating to flirt coaches: How ai is changing dating, for better or worse” on the CBC website (in English)
3. Consult the websiteAI 2027 (in English)
4. Read the text “Does use Chatgpt decrease our brain activity?” »On the Radio-Canada site
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