Creative writing in the hands of artificial intelligence

This article investigates how human and artificial intelligence (AI) influence each other and what prospects of this unprecedented coexistence might be in the future in relation to creative writing. Starting from the definition and comparison of different types of natural intelligence and the connection of human intelligence with the development of AI, this short study analyses fourteen Bard-generated application letters for jobs in music or the hospitality industry prompted by three different descriptors: the first group includes four regular application letters; another group includes four humorous texts created by the same program without specific prompts apart from asking them to be humorous; and the third group includes six texts which provide more detailed prompts related to the specificities of humour. The humour analysis is based on the concept of humour transaction schema and takes into account the linguistic, semantic, and socio-cultural characteristics of the humour products. The analysis demonstrated that AI-generated texts can be humorous and entertaining, but that they also lack human imagination in terms of going beyond what is already known. As application of AI language-learning machines and models have been in rapid and diversified expansion worldwide, more questions about the possible risks related to the use of AI language programs and the readership response to AI-created texts are discussed, concluding that AI sets forth new questions in relation to the future of creative writing.