If I should die tonight and anyone should ask in passing, “Was Murray coming around on ChatGPT toward the end?” you may show them this. (H/t to fellow defender of the soul of the world, Tim Pollard.)
OK, just a few more words: Was asked about ChatGPT on a podcast the other day and heard myself telling the podcaster that I think I’m cheating when I turn to a thesaurus. Why? When I publish some writing, I want those words to be organic outgrowths of my life’s knowledge: What I have seen, who I have known and what I have read and all I have retained.
To go off and snag another word for “surprise” that starts with a “t” so I can complete some alliterative litany—it strikes me as a cheap trick. Glitter, tinsel, Gorilla Glue, duct tape, Bondo Wood Filler. I do it occasionally, and reassure myself that the rest of my prose has such intellectual and spiritual integrity that it can withstand a little electronic post-production patch-up.
I realize that attitude might come off as both prissy and vain, but I share it with you to illustrate my basic orientation here, and to help you see how unthinkable is the notion that I would go to ChatGPT for a whole sentence, paragraph or metaphor that did not burble up from my own experience. The piece would immediately cease to feel mine, and the reason I love to write is that my writing is the only thing I can call mine.
When I get to talking this way, the inevitable response is: Easy, Flaubert. Not all writing is worthy of such standards of personal expression.
To which I can only respond that I write a lot of pretty routine shit—marketing and website copy for company, for instance—that I could not bring myself to bother typing if I truly believed anyone else (or anything else) could write it quite the way I do.
I know there are many sane people who don’t feel this way. My sister-in-law is in tech, and though she writes very well on her own, she loves the head start she can get with a good ChatGPT prompt. I also know there are communicators who use AI with less compunction than I use a thesaurus; they’re paid for quantity more than quality. And I even know some creative types who think of AI as a great “thought partner.”
But to paraphrase Nick Cave, you should probably “fucking desist” if you want to continue calling yourself a “writer.”
AI is one of those rare instances where I’m glad I’m 61 and not 21. Unfortunately, it’s not about whether ChatGPT can replace real communicators, but whether the people who count beans for a living BELIEVE it can.
Agreed, Gerry. And probably, if we were 21, we would by necessity come to see ChatGPT as a legit writer’s assistant. I do remember being not much older than that and being absolutely outraged at the idea that after drawing the reader into a piece by a great headline, subhead and lead, I would then include a “hyperlink,” allowing the reader to slip out the door no sooner than I’d ushered her in! But I’m happy to leave documents like this blog post as markers of how one self-serious writer felt at the dawning of generative AI.