When the updated ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022, it was difficult not to join the rush of people writing hot takes on why it was going to “change everything” or why writing jobs were “over” or why AI can never be as good as humans. But I like to mull things over rather than react.
I did play with ChatGPT, and I’ll admit, I was a little thrown off, at first. The technology was easy to use and returned reasonably adequate results. My initial qualms can be quickly summed up:
- It did not reference its sources.
- It did not clearly indicate whether there were direct quotations.
- I only knew that it was returning acceptable results because I was familiar with the subjects I used as prompts.
- It had a bland, vacuous style.
But I knew none of that would be a deal breaker in the copywriting world. We still say “Content is king,” but the reality is that no one wants to pay much for it. In the SEO game, people can get caught up looking for keyword density, internal linking, and hitting similar targets to what’s already out there. That can get you a certain distance and definitely makes it look like you’re doing something for your clients, but it requires a lot of content production. When you’re paying by the hour, the economics work against the writer.
With ChatGPT, you have a tool that appears to reduce the time it takes to produce content from 3–4 hours to a few seconds plus some editing.
So, yeah, it got my attention.
The Early ChatGPT Hot Takes
Many of the early ChatGPT hot takes were predictable. On the one hand, you had the futurists who get excited any time we can make a machine do anything. They were exclaiming (and are still exclaiming) that ChatGPT “changes everything” and that if you don’t get on board you’ll be left behind.
Color me unconvinced. They all said that about TikTok, too. Yet plenty of brands are sticking to the big four—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram—with maybe some LinkedIn thrown in there. They seem to be doing fine. And I’m sure there’s money to be made in one metaverse or another, but I’m not seeing a mad scramble for my services there. It’s easy to boost a fad if no one really cares whether you’re right or not.
On the other hand, you had the skeptics who were searching for any reason to criticize the new tool for what it couldn’t do. I was inclined to this side, anyway, so I knew to be wary of jumping too quickly on board any view that confirmed what I already wanted to believe. Where the futurists are always at risk of chasing fads, the humanists (let’s call them) are always at risk of protesting too much.
A Reflective Take on ChatGPT
With the benefit of a few months of observation, have I arrived at any insights?
As a writer, I don’t see a way to avoid having some perspective on this ChatGPT/AI writing business. Sure, it’s a little satisfying that Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search engine is basically out of control and sometimes creepy. But chances are they’ll fix the bugs and wind up with something very useable. Then we’ll forget the schadenfreude as we become habitual users of the new tools.
In other words, yes, I think AI-generated text will probably become the norm. For the near future, at least, most companies will still require a human layer to quality check the output, but the trend will be toward more content with fewer writers. I think this despite most people who actually know about this stuff feeling somewhere between mild interest and “meh” on ChatGPT.
My reasoning? Certainly not because it’s “better.”
Rather, I think people will settle for the merely-acceptable-to-barely-adequate writing that AI can produce. After all, we already settle for a lot of merely acceptable to barely adequate content.
ChatGPT is “Good Enough Tech”
I think often about a 2009 Wired piece about “good enough tech.” The idea was that, despite the availability of fancy tech, most of us settle for “good enough tech”:
We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.
Or even good, one might say. Have you read the internet lately? There is a lot of (barely) good enough writing out there. Much writing is almost literally not intended for reading. It’s just there to attract the bots while human users scroll through a slideshow.
And we all know we’re addicted to that little dopamine hit we get from a notification. We know the experience of scrolling just one more time in hopes of seeing something interesting. (Despite having spent several minutes not seen anything interesting.) Moreover, we know that smart people literally design the internet to trigger neurochemicals rather than real provide “value.”
Why, then, should we think we will prefer high-quality human writing over AI copy when we’re trying to find a mechanic or reading the latest gossip about Florence Pugh?
In other words, we’ll have a ChatGPT future if we don’t expect or ask for anything better.
The Value of Good Writing
But that won’t mean that writing—good writing—goes away. Good writing tends to attract us by its ability to break us out of the haze of the mundane.
The market for this kind of writing may shrink or change, but I don’t think it will ultimately disappear. For instance, the market for poetry has changed dramatically since the 19th century, but it isn’t entirely gone. The market for vinyl has come back among a certain kind of music lover. Some people are even downgrading to flip phones.
I believe there will always be at least a small market for writing that shows the human mind at work and reveals something to us about ourselves.
What ChatGPT Cannot Do
But it won’t be there if we lose sight of its value, which is what happens when we rush to make or save money with a new technology.
That’s why Nick Cave is so disgusted with the enthusiasm for AI writing as a replacement for real thought.
In his words:
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.
Note the end, there: “No matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.” That’s dark. But he’s picking up on the fact that we’ve been happily trading in real experiences for virtual ones for nearly two decades now. Chances are things will have to get worse for good ole human experience before it gets better. Even then, it will only be for that segment of people who intentionally resist their own virtualization.
What We Do With Our New Tech
Okay, so ChatGPT can save us some time. But what have we learned about time-saving tech in the last thirty years? That our national religion demands we fill that new time with either more work or consumption.
In other words, we’re not using the tech to make our lives richer or more meaningful. We’re using it to fill up all the time it saves us.
Which is why some smart people suggest the tech is using us.
The value of good writing is in the way it connects one person to another. You can mimic that in ways that may feel good enough, but, in Cave’s words, you’ll only have created a travesty, a soulless pastiche that signals your despair at real human connection.
The Forgotten Value of Writing
As a former college professor, I can’t help but comment on another value of writing (one that only college professors seem concerned about). Writing is not some necessary evil to help us overcome our restrictions to times and places. It is itself a technology that taught us new ways of thinking. In fact, one might argue that what we call thinking would be impossible without writing.
Writing requires us to put one word after the other in order to communicate meaning and meaningfully to another human mind. It has limitations that speech can overcome, but it also has advantages that make up for the shortcomings of speech—and images, for that matter.
Sure, writing well can help you not embarrass yourself on a job application or meet the minimum requirements for drafting reports or even to help you sound intelligent when you email your kid’s teacher. But writing has a more important function: to help us think what we could not otherwise think.
Let’s go back to Nick Cave. He describes songwriting in the most dramatic terms:
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 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 artists have always done the best work, and it’s probably always been somewhat fringe. Maybe you got lucky and found a patron, but then you had to dedicate everything to them like they were the real heroes.
Real human work has value because of its humanness. It represents the unique contribution of a personality working with the capacities and limitations we all face. To the extent that we diminish that in favor of selling more widgets, we may be solving the wrong problem.
