Only a handful of people grasp the magnitude of the changes that are about to hit us. They’re exciting – and terrifying
A short while ago, a screenwriter friend from Los Angeles called me. “I have three years left,” he said. “Maybe five if I’m lucky.” He had been allowed to test a screenplay AI still in development. He described a miniseries: main characters, plot and atmosphere – and a few minutes later, there they were, all the episodes, written and ready for filming. Then he asked the AI for improvement suggestions on its own series, and to his astonishment, they were great – smart, targeted, witty and creative. The AI completely overhauled the ending of one episode, and with those changes the whole thing was really good. He paused for a moment, then repeated that he had three years left before he would have to find a new job.
In 2020, I participated in an experiment that I gave a lecture on the following year, later published as a booklet titled My Algorithm and I. In it, I describe my failed collaboration with a large language model at a time when these AIs were not yet publicly available. If you want to understand AI better and analyse our current situation, please do not read my book. It has been so overtaken by technical development in the past three years that today it is so outdated it’s as though it came from a different period in world history, like a text about the first railways or a biplane airshow.
Daniel Kehlmann is a German-language novelist and playwright. His TV series, Kafka, is on Channel 4
This article is adapted from a speech given in Berlin this month at a celebration of German cultural politics in the presence of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz
