Why AI can’t take over creative writing

A large language model tries to generate what a random person who had produced the previous text would produce. (Shutterstock)

In 1948, the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, proposed modelling language in terms of the probability of the next word in a sentence given the previous words. These types of probabilistic language models were largely derided, most famously by linguist Noam Chomsky: “The notion of ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one.”