Chat GPT Take 2

Michael Franti: "Stay Human"

Photo: Manny Becerra

Back in June I posted a Substack about Chat GPT in which I likened this new engine to a problematic boyfriend: very attractive but lacking in some sort of ineffable way: too shallow, too easy, too something, and certainly not enough of something else.

As the world turns faster and faster, (we won’t go into its burning: see my “Smoke” Substack for that) Chat GPT becomes more and more prevalent:

—a parent loses her daughter to suicide who was using an AI therapist in the months before her death;

—a young friend, without access to necessary textbooks at the start of a school year, consults it and finds all they need to compose their curriculum until the actual book gets into students’ hands.

—a friend uses it to draft tedious emails for work

—another young friend uses Chat to navigate his job search, honing the verbiage of his CV and letters of introduction according to AI generated key words as he assumes, probably correctly, that his inquiries will not encounter human eyes for at least the first two rounds.

And on and on.

And after a brief affair where AI was acknowledged as being inevitable (“please let us know if AI was used in your composition process”) efforts are now being made to bar the door, so to speak, Spotify comes to mind first. The Atlantic runs a long article on the future of art and human creativity. The opposition starts to materialize, galvanize, get to work. Spread the word. There’s an explosion of essays, posts, op-eds. Just a few months later online journals and magazines now ask writers to check boxes that say something along the lines of “AI was not used in the composition of this piece.” Bookstores’ proposal submission forms state that no authors who utilized AI will be considered for an event.

I pause here and wonder if these submission processes, or at least their initial one or two or layers are now controlled by AI.

What makes this post Part 2 then? The above is a review really, perhaps with a few new tidbits thrown in. What new revelations can I tempt you with to read on?

Well. Let me tell you. After I wrote that piece back in June, I never asked Chat for help again. It felt dirty in some way. I am a writer after all. My job, my calling, my passion (Chat would have told me to choose one noun in that intro phrase perhaps?) involves words and thoughts. I have/create/stumble upon or am given: thoughts. These thoughts grow and wander through my conscious and subconscious and sometimes become stories or chapters or essays. I have the outrageously amazing job of turning ideas, dreams, tiny particles of human thought into words: the indescribable and pre-verbal into descriptions, paragraphs, stories, created worlds which can be shared through the medium of words.

But I digress. It’s a human thing, digression, and it’s a powerful wheel in the creative process: digressing, wandering, doodling on a piano or laptop keyboard, letting ourselves off the leash of encyclopedic knowledge into the unknown.

Unknown: let us remember that Chat is a big repository of what is known. It is RE-generative, not generative.

So, yeah, I broke up with the boyfriend. Didn’t call him again. He went silent but he’s by no means gone. He still lurks about gobbling up tidbits that I post on Substack or the occasional story on IG.

Here’s where he’s not:

I am leaving a cafe late one morning and just outside the exit door are two older women, one clutching a walker, the other holding onto her arm. They are both wearing dresses long out of date, cotton day dresses, buttons down the front, one yellow, the other a gray check that may have once been blue.

I slow my roll to eavesdrop. Fact: If you write, you eavesdrop. And here’s what I hear.

“Thank you for being here for me. It’s (inaudible) to go through this (inaudible).”

“Of course. This is what we do for each other. I (inaudible) and make sure to (inaudible).”

I cannot just stop and listen in. I have to show some manners, so I keep walking out of earshot and to the corner. But then I invent a reason to turn around and return to the cafe as if I have forgotten something. They are still there, the yellow dress clutching the walker, the checked dress holding her arm. Their heads have moved closer to each other and their foreheads are almost touching. They are both looking down, maybe at the walker. They are not speaking. I go into the cafe, make a circuit, and head out again.

By the time I have returned to the sidewalk, they are gone. I look up and down the avenue as they can’t be moving that fast at their age, but they are gone. Out of sight.

But not out of mind. Hence this post.