I have largely ignored all of the debate over ChatGPT (“Generative Pre-training Tranformer), the artificial intelligence program used to generate prose. I have largely ignored it because I am not ready to come to grips with the fact that a phone app might be able to write a better essay than me. But if Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah is correct, it may be time to come to grips with all of this, or at least offer some thoughtful analysis and/or critique.
Here is a taste of her piece, “For writers, AI is like a performance-enhancing steroid“:
A few weeks ago, I had dinner with some friends. One of them pulled out his phone and asked me if I thought I had written more than 200 pieces or so at this stage of my career. “Probably,” I said. “Why?”
“You know, the way things are going, artificial intelligence is going to be able to write articles and books just by analyzing your writing style.” I was initially incredulous, maybe a bit dismissive. Then my friend went to a program on his phone and put in a query, asking it to write a 1,000-word Christmas story in the style of Charles Dickens. To my amazement, the program started churning out paragraphs within seconds — and not just a jumble of random words. The grafs had sentence variation, color, plot development.
He did another query: Think of a title for a children’s holiday book aimed at a Black audience. Within seconds, a list populated — and the winner was something to the effect of “Zahra’s Big Holiday Surprise.” I was stunned.
My friend smiled. “The future is already here,” he said. “You might as well get ahead of it as a writer.”
I thought of that convo as the news came down this week that the popular electronics site CNET has been using AI to write full articles. Frank Landymore at the Byte documents how eagle-eyed marketer Gael Breton figured out that CNET had quietly published more than 70 articles using AI since November, under the author name “CNET Money Staff.” Clicking on the author’s note reveals the truth:
“This article was assisted by an AI engine and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by our editorial staff.”
And this:
I told my friends that AI felt like an intellectual steroid. Writers can spend years reading the works of other writers and, over time, integrate those writers’ styles into their own work. But a bot can do it in under a minute. What does this mean for book authors? Will using AI come to be seen as “cheating”? Will writers start proclaiming they are “natural” writers, with no AI use in their work, akin to bodybuilders who choose not to use performance-enhancing drugs?
I’m not as widely known or read as Dickens (yet, at least! #ManifestingItIntoExistence), but does this mean that at some point, someone could program a bot to write exactly like me? As with music, writing in the English language follows certain rules to make it pleasing and memorable. If people can engineer pop music to make it as appealing as possible to the wide world, why wouldn’t it be the same for writing?
I know it’s a scary thing to think about, especially as colleagues in my field are facing layoffs and belt-tightening measures. But my friend is right: Journalists and regulators need to get with the program and think seriously about how AI can help … or hurt.
Read the entire piece here.
I’ve only begun to think about this app–and more as a teacher than a writer. My gut reaction is to say to college students: “real education aims at enabling you to control the machines…which is important because, apparently, they can already write better than you.” But that’s just a gut reaction, and I’m–we’re–going to have to think harder about it.
I will have the opportunity to give a lecture on Plato to our entire first-year class in the spring (common first-year liberal arts course). I am thinking I’ll work up a new version centered around the question of what Socrates would make of ChatGPT. Socrates was, after all, interested in doing things that this machine can’t–and likely never will.
Today I asked seven honors students about the app. Only one knew about it.
Nick Cave addressed this today, in reference to song-writing:
“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.
“It may sound like I’m taking all this a little too personally, but I’m a songwriter who is engaged, at this very moment, in the process of songwriting. It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness. What that new idea is, I don’t know, but it is out there somewhere, searching for me. In time, we will find each other.”
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/
I think that holds for all genuine writing.
Being in IT automation, we’re looking at ways we can leverage this app in our contact (call) center and for all technologist writing code and troubleshooting systems. It’s been a pretty impressive app so far.
And yes, I am a history geek that has follow this blog for a long time.
Thanks for sharing this, John.
Interesting, Storm. If you do write that Socrates lecture I’d love to read it.