Towards “Creativity Amplification”: Or, AI for writers, or beating the system

In his 1993 paper delivered at NASA’s Vision-21 conference, science fiction writer and computer scientist Vernor Vinge asked: “We already have programs that can play [chess] much better than humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human to get to something better?” This article is an attempt to undertake some of that work, by recording and reflecting on some of the experiments I undertook while endeavouring to treat AI not as the enemy, but as IA¾Intelligence Amplification¾and how this approach affected my writing practice, developing into what might be called Creativity Amplification. Rather than being an exhaustive exploration of the technologies cited (GPT-2, chatbots and Charisma AI) and the processes developed while using them, this article is intended as an invitation to explore and play with them, and a call to practice IA thinking in relation to all technologies, old and new.