It Sounds so Right, It Must be Wrong
Musings on ChatGPT
“Join us for an engaging discussion.” I read the line again and paused. The sentence sat unassuming in a corporate email promoting a work event. I had drafted the original and sent it to a colleague for the final edits. It returned with an engaging discussion. And that’s when I knew something was off.
Several of my colleagues of late have been playing and embracing Chat GPT. The descriptions and experiences with the new artificial intelligence (AI) writing app have been both positive and critical. And I can see the power it brings to daily work. It gives a starting point, when your brain refuses to offer one. It smoothes out the awkward and jumbled thoughts on written communication that you need to produce quickly, hit its mark, and move along with your day.
This open-AI tool has become an interesting experiment in daily written communications. What auto-tunes did for bad singers, ChatGPT does for bad writers. And I can’t fault it for the power and productivity it brings. If you’ve long been afraid to face the blank page and that first sentence, you can start a conversation with this application and get a solid starting point or rough draft in no time.
One may find it odd that someone who writes for a living is willing to wax poetic on the power of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. After all, there’s plenty of dark warnings and prophets out there, and their words should be heeded to some extent, as we enter the new age of AI.
It will cost jobs they say. They may be right in some areas. It can be used for nefarious purposes: misinformation, cheats, crooks, hucksters, will all embrace this tool. Then again, hucksters and ne’er do wells have always embraced the cutting edge. Some of our best internet inventions (streaming for example) got a lot of technological boosts due to pornographers and other dark corners of the web.
Teachers may have it the hardest with AI, as it affects how they will assess a student’s true knowledge of subjects and ability to communicate it. Educators will once again feel behind the latest technological advancements; as Bobby in the third row suddenly produces work without spelling and grammar errors, and seems suspiciously coherent for a kid who thinks crayons have a nutritious value.
How will anyone know what anyone truly knows?
But that’s where we come back to our engaging conversation.
When I looked at that sentence, it was correct and agreeable, but it did not sound like the true voice of my colleague. A brilliant person with a sharp wit, who finds “engaging” frivolous at heart. Introspective. Reflective. Thought-provoking. All choices or even none at all, would have all sounded more like the true voice of this person. And that’s where AI falls down. I knew immediately it was AI-enhanced. Not bad for a human writer.
ChatGPT can search all of the Internet and create an amalgamation of the perfect words for the search terms the user has entered. It has billions upon billions of our past content to harvest and perfect. But it lacks color. Imagination. The sound imprint we all bring to how we talk and write. How we know each other at heart.
I can see a coming world where all of our texts and online writing will look as perfect as a staged Instagram image. And then when we meet in person, we’ll stumble, mumble, and desperately seek the verbal words to match our scripted perfected tomes. It will be an awkward verbal version of our handwritten signatures: A scrawl of desperation and memory of an old skill.
What will that bring for us?
But toothpaste does not go back in the tube. We too will adapt to this change. Some of the doomsayers predictions will come true, as well as the optimists. Some will thrive from its uses and it will make us smarter, more efficient. Other uses will damage deeply. It will both help and hurt. And it’s here to stay.
And as we move forward, it’s worth considering what our personal human signature looks like. How do we nurture that in our communications with others? What does it mean for what we create? What we choose to consume? What energy and imprint do we want to imbue during our time within humanity? For that, no machine can mimic…at least for now.
