Star letter

When Barry Collins sits down to write a column, in the back of his mind he might have an image of where people are as they read it. At home, on the train or in a coffee shop perhaps? I bet “on the khazi in the Novotel at Tehran airport” is not on your list.

That unnecessarily graphic piece of detail aside, it was with a wry smile that I read Barry’s column regarding Google’s AI trying to sound human ( see issue 286, p25). The article I read immediately prior to this was the one about SatoshiPay ( see issue 286, p22). Before the end of the opening sentence I thought, “I bet Barry wrote this”. My eyes jumped to the end of the article and – sure enough – he did.

As a very long-term subscriber to PC Pro, I can generally tell who the author of a piece is. Each human has their own stylistic fingerprint and I find it highly unlikely that this well ever be realistically mimicked by an AI. AI may be able to take a set of stock market data for example, and turn it into a readable report, but it will never be the sort of prose people will pay to read. Nor will it ever be able to provide the human slant on a topic that other humans crave.

So long as you continue to produce quality articles that stand out from the clickbait nonsense that ruins most websites, actual journalists producing physical magazines will have a future. Gavin Hall