I think that you are correct, we will see AI used as a copilot for artists and content creators. I have had access to the OpenAI APIs for GPT-3 since last summer, and in addition to using this for NLP tasks, I have also experimented with using GPT-3 to help me work on a sci-fi short book that I have been occasionally writing for years. It has been useful for expanding sections that I have been stuck on. I feel that I should copyright my story as being authored by The Internet since every content creator whose text, programming listings, etc. that goes into training these language models has in some sense been a contributor to my short story.
You know how you can break writing down into 2 phases: creative and edit?
What if you did the creative part, braindumping all your ideas and vision into a word document. Then had an AI edit your incoherent story into engaging prose.
I find the creative part easy, but the editing part tedious.
Like, a doctor I know asked me to write a review for him. I did the braindump part, but have been procrastinating on the edit part.
Unfortunately, GPT-3, CoPilot, AlphaCode, etc., also excel more at the creative part (helped out by their enormous training database, which saves you from doing the Google search to match your high-level description to examples), but they're still dogshit at editing, because that is the part that actually requires a detailed understanding of the text. So the princess is still in the next castle.
Hmm it intuitively seems like the editing part should be the easy part, because the output is basically a template, and you just need to fill it in, and tweak it a little bit…
I get with code it’s a bit less so, but still, there are plenty of design patterns which basically cover a lot of the output space…
The context window of GPT-3 is vanishingly small compared to any novel-like work. GPT-3 will happily invent descriptions of characters and objects that contradict what it suggested three pages ago.
Not saying it can't help you with getting an idea what to describe, but this is the kind of "editing" that it won't be good at.