Every writer I know is in despair at the prospect being replaced by AI. Many of them say they never use it on principle; I know all of them do.
So this week, as part of my AI diary, I’m conducting the forbidden experiment in plain sight. I’m going toe to toe with ChatGPT as a creative writer. Can it truly match me, and might it replace me? Let’s settle this.
We do battle using writing prompts, selected at random from an excellent new guide called A Year of Creative Thinking by Jessica Swale. The first page I flip to has us inventing new words for existing things. It’s very fun. A cheese grater, I decide, could easily be known as a “stinkchizzle”. A very long road would be better as a “slodgepuff”. A fart becomes a “piffsnut”, and a dream an “asterfantastic”. I’m pleased with that one. But how does the machine do?
For cheesegrater it has scritchygrater, which is obviously crap. Very long road? Neverendipath. Bit literal. Trumpelsnort is pretty good, as is slumberwhim. I like nibblink for mouse. For some reason, I could only come up with “pimpsquint”.
I think I’ve got the edge – with a caveat. We’re both doing pastiche. What about more complex writing?
Time to up the ante: I copy and paste a huge selection of my own journalism into the chatbot, in the section that allows one to customise their own GPT. Naturally, I experience corrosive anxiety as I do. Hammering the lid of your own coffin closed used to be a physical impossibility – thank God for progress.
RhikGPT, as it is now known, describes itself as sharp yet self-aware, with the ability to reflect on modern loneliness with humour. “How are you?” I ask, nervously.
The response is instant. Running on tea and curiosity. Mildly chaotic, but mostly cheerful, like a fox rifling through the recycling.
Prickles run up my arm. Assonance, failed alliteration, a meaningless animal simile … It really does sound like me, a guinea pig stuck in a tuba.
We land on an ambitious prompt. Write five sentences using the word “heart” in different contexts – literal or figurative – followed by a 200-word piece, that combines at least two of those ideas. In theory, the exercise favours me: I’m the one bringing internal organs to a pen-fight.
I go first. I teach a yearly creative writing week in Italy where we impress on students the value of specificity, and this is what I go for. Making an instinctive decision, I write a telling moment from an ambiguous love story between women who work in retail. Truthfully, I’m pleased.
This is my attempt at the exercise:
Sara lay on the comforter, visualising the fluttering in her chest. Was this panic? It was frustrating that her mind kept returning to work. Like an itch – when she was on the sales floor, the day always took on a prickly heat.
Quinn seemed to see straight through Sara. “When a guy comes in that you like, you stand different,” she had offered today, when Sara had only come over to re-fold cardigans. Then, as if playing a hand of cards, she’d turned. Unfurled her neck exaggeratedly, rose-tattooed shoulders open. She wore an expression somehow stupid yet alert, goose-like. Sara had to suppress the impulse to laugh. Her mortification mixed with an unfamiliar sensation, which she didn’t like. Not the feeling; the mystery of it.
“Why are you watching me?” Her tone caught awkwardly, blushing the air. No response. It was the silence that now struck Sara as obscene. Quinn had resumed arranging her rail, infuriating half-smile curling the corner of her lips, like smoke.
What if this was indigestion? Should she try some pink stuff? The caged flutter recalled the music her father played in his study. Skittering brush-like drums, that made her queasy. What if something was seriously wrong? Sara closed her eyes. If heartbeats are the percussion of our lives, she thought, then God hates jazz.
Now it’s RhikGPT’s turn. It thinks for five seconds, then hammers out some paragraphs. My heart sinks. It sinks while I’m laughing, a terrible feeling.
The melancholy piece, about a trip to a florist, not only makes sense, it’s funny. Sure, there’s too many metaphors, some variable jokes. It’s more compressed, strangely airless. But I do think many people would say the AI’s piece is better:
At the heart of town there’s a florist whose roses look like sirens: all red mouth, all warning. I buy one because my chest feels unfurnished, an Airbnb between tenants. Outside, a bus screeches; a pigeon argues with a chip. A cellist saws at the air as if carving a door where no door exists, and for a second I believe in emergency exits.
“Take heart,” my therapist says, which sounds like a shoplifting tip for feelings. I picture slipping courage under my coat and walking briskly past security. Instead I take the long way home, past kebab glitter and the nail bar named after an emotion. The rose keeps pricking my palm through the paper, a tiny curriculum in pain: focus sharpens you, but you’ll leak a little.
In the kitchen I put the flower in a mug that says WORLD’S OKEST PERSON and it looks immediately improved by honesty. I text three friends I’ve been avoiding and tell them nothing important, which turns out to be important. The city dims; the cello’s phantom bow still rubs at silence. I want proof I’m more than habit. I don’t get proof. I get breath, and the small relief of doing one gentle thing on purpose. It’s enough, for now. Take heart, I tell no one. I do.
To be clear, I prefer mine. I think RhikGPT’s piece is shallow and meaningless; a hung together list of stylish lines. It’s facile. But AI illusions will improve, and any human editor can smooth them into a viable sense. This is a business and ethics decision, not an artistic one.
So, can ChatGPT do my job? Is it better at writing?
Yes, I think my job is probably over. But a job is not the same as writing.
Writing is not ventriloquising. I think of it as embodied thought, and attentive readers can tell the difference. Of course my slowness and inconsistency make me less useful than AI within a mechanistic, capitalist worldview. I write to expand that worldview, if not destroy it utterly.
At least, this is what I’ll tell myself in five years, crawling through an Indonesian tin mine harvesting metals for microchips, when my AI boss doesn’t even want my feedback on its poems. Very hurtful!
Rhik Samadder is a columnist, playwright and performer, who co-runs The Tuscan Table, a creative writing retreat in Italy
