Artificial intelligence cannot replace me yet, says Esquire magazine editor
- Esquire Singapore used artificial intelligence to write some articles and recommend story ideas for its April issue
- Editor Norman Tan says replacing human editors “was not the intention”
Scribes of the world, rejoice! There is still some time before we are replaced by machines able to spit out reams of velvet prose in less than the time it takes to sharpen a 2B pencil. For smooth the (robot) prose was not.
That conclusion we drew from examining the work of an artificial intelligence writer developed by QLX for Esquire Singapore, which used the bot to write some articles and recommend story ideas for the April edition of the magazine.
Consider the following two paragraphs of the machine-written Editor’s Letter:
Have you ever received a letter from Santa Claus? Santa Claus is supposed to live at the North Pole. He is loved throughout the world. And Santa Claus does not exist.
More than 150 experts in AI, robotics, trade, law and ethics from 14 countries have signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to grant identity to intelligent machines.
While the machine certainly did not produce Hemingwayesque work, it was not rubbish either, if one ignores the non sequitur. But why would Esquire Singapore editor Norman Tan participate in an exercise that could well accelerate the demise of his chosen profession? What next? AI Wintour?