The more I see articles hawking the profound benefits of ChatGPT and its ilk to the future of writing, the more I grow confused. Let me explain.
See, as a linguist, it bothers the living hell out of me that people can remotely pretend that ChatGPT, GPT4 or any of its successors can really be considered a challenge to proper writing driven by a human mind, experiences and emotions.
If we’re getting technical, the GPTs are information collection and aggregation tools with a language output front end strapped onto them. In basic terms, it can copy, paste and make basic edits to stuff like nothing quite before it. It’s like cutting up the poetry of a notable author into strips, then rearranging it into a ‘new’ poem in effect.
It’s the equivalent of a basic copying and transformation exercise that’d fit into a middle school English class, but it’s a hollow copy all the same; it’s just done at a fraction of the time a human could. It’s also purely based on the internal algorithms and this informs how it scoops information and re-purposes it.
On the other hand, humans are capable such absolute and absurd spontaneity that it’s staggering even to consider. There is no consistent source of ideas or definable trigger of ‘what if I wrote about X’, and it’ll depend entirely on an author and where they are at any individual point in time - but this is how we’ve gotten the all-time classics and books that have kept us going in tough and uncertain times. It’s why we see posts from someone halfway across the world and fall into deep reflection when scrolling through our feeds. It’s the spark that you can only get from that element.
I mean, hell, during a hike in 2020 and all of the advisories of staying 1.5 meters apart in public, the random idea of “What is the optimal basic safe distance between you and a zombie” popped into my head out of the blue. It’s the wonder of being human and having ideas spark.
