I have not yet downloaded Meta AI. I have never once used ChatGPT. This places me very much on the outside looking in at the burgeoning artificial intelligence craze taking over the world. My wife has used this technology many times with great success, once when the cupboard was a bit bare she simply took a picture of several random ingredients she had on hand and asked ChatGPT what kind of meal she could make out of them. The result was delicious! I have also many other friends who have embraced AI, even one of the pastors at my church admitted to using it to clarify a point in a sermon. This technology has the look and feel of something that is inevitable, the sort of thing that in five years people will wonder how we ever got along without. I am not at all blind to the many benefits of AI especially in the area of medical research and high end computing. My problem is basically with the name we have given it—artificial intelligence. There is nothing at all artificial about intelligence. Its creation comes from real intelligence culled from several thousands of years of human discovery, fed into a new shiny machine. But there’s another thing about AI that gives me pause.
I am a writer. Well, not a real writer who does it for a living, but one for whom writing has been my number one hobby and closest friend for over fifty years. I believe that if you have written seven novels, twenty-five short stories and over three thousand blog posts during your life, you’re entitled to call yourself a writer. The question posed by AI for a writer is a simple one—could I submit a difficult chapter of a story I’m trying to write into an artifical intelligence program and ask it to clean up any inconsistencies with grammar or plot construction? From everything I’ve come to understand about this technology the answer is YES. Not only can it be done but it can be done in milliseconds instead of the months it might take me to work the thing out. But at that point, would it still be rightfully considered my work?
Some might say, isn’t this the same thing an editor would do? No, an editor would present problems with plot or sentence formation or dialogue to me and ask me to do a rewrite.
But, the story would still be mine, even after the AI rewrite, so what’s the big deal?
Well, I think there’s a huge deal. No, a post-AI version of my story is no longer my story in any authentic way. I am not here suggesting that my version would be better, in fact I’m quite sure that AI could produce much smoother prose than I can since it has access to practically every word of fiction every written—and I don’t.
The joy of writing, the thing that makes it so damn fulfilling is the mystery of creating something from nothing. Every story I have ever written began as a random thought, a flash of memory, a burst of inspiration—what if?? I believe this is how it is with the creation of all kinds of art, especially music. Do we really want to turn over this process to machines? I would rather read a flawed book written by a fellow human being than a perfectly crafted one produced by a computer program. I would rather listen to a melody that sprang from the depths of the human soul than one that was crafted by a finely tuned algorithm who never felt pain, loss or joy.
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