A friend of mine recently met someone involved with the development of Quarkle.ai an AI writing tool. My friend sent me a link to the site with the question: Ted, this something you would use?
I watched the demo video. If you’re interested in the role AI might be playing in the creative arts, especially writing, I’d urge you to check it out.
Quarkle is an interesting application of AI for writing. Honestly, I see this as the way AI will help writers in the near future. It’s more in line with the current capabilities of AI. We still can’t ask Chatgpt to write a story about X in the style of Y. See my previous blog posts for how that went. Bottom line: AI can’t do that (yet). That is still too great of a leap.
But Quarkle represents the actual next, incremental, step forward. Humans (right now) are still needed to pull together a whole story from start to finish. Quarkle allows for that, but as you write that story it has suggestions. These notes are more than just sentence completion. They are notes on tone, pacing, and other things a real life editor might provide. If there is anyone’s job that is threatened here, it’s editors.
Spell check and grammar checks of word processors made copy editing easier, thanks to technology. Quarkle does the same, except with line editing and even some developmental notes.
And it’s useful to note that with the advent of word processors with spell and grammar check, copy editors did not disappear.
Just sayin.
You might have guessed I am one of those people who thinks the panic over AI replacing us in ALL our jobs is alarmist. What I anticipate is a collaboration between creatives and AI, using tools like Quarkle. Will tools like this eliminate writers, or editors? I still don’t think so. They might streamline the process and even make us more productive as AI is integrated into how we work. The most optimistic view is that tools such as these free us up to focus more on the things only humans can do.
It’s akin to the movement from type writers to word processors. We writers no longer had to endure the laborious tedium of retyping every page after a pass of editing. That freed us to focus more on “writerly” things such as plot and character. I think it’s allowed us to tell better stories in sharper language.
That said I don’t know if I would use Quarkle myself. It’s taken me a long time to develop my own process and I feel confident with it. That is not a judgment on Quarkle, it’s more a statement of me and my own inflexibility. I don’t see any reason young writers starting out wouldn’t use it as they develop their own creative process. It’s progress and it moves forward, whether we like it or not.
One caveat. I like many artists, I have concerns about where AIs are gathering their learning material. I do think it’s unfair for these AIs to scrape up content from creatives and use it for learning, or even output, without compensation. Rules for guiding that are coming. We’re seeing norms established right before our eyes with court cases, writer and actor strikes, and union/management negotiations. All of this is accompanied by the angst and anxiety that comes with any technological disruption.
The technology may be new, but that isn’t.