It’s one of those topics that comes up over drinks or dinner at the moment: whether or not you think AI is going to steal your job. So far, I’ve felt relatively confident that while AI could no doubt have a fair crack at writing a newspaper opinion column, there is something I do as part of my work that AI cannot: reporting.
Except now, it seems, AI is claiming to be doing that as well. Last week, it was revealed that at least six reputable publications have had to take down published articles because it turned out that they were probably pieces of fiction written by AI and then passed off by somebody as works of journalism under the name of Margaux Blanchard. One of these was a piece for Wired titled They Fell in Love Playing Minecraft. Then the Game Became Their Wedding Venue, which quoted a “digital celebrant” called Jessica Hu, who does not seem to actually exist. Another publication, called Dispatch, received a pitch from “Blanchard” about an ex-mining town called Gravemont that had been repurposed as a training ground for death investigation. Gravemont doesn’t exist either.
When I get into social conversations on subjects like ChatGPT, I try to fight the red mist that descends on me. I hate ChatGPT. And I call it hatred because it provokes a physical reaction in me of something just below real anger. I don’t find it scary, or annoying, or confusing. I hate it.
So I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of what it is exactly that I hate. There are decent reasons to rejoice at the advent of the AI age. It seems likely that it will have the capacity to revolutionise, for instance, scientific endeavour: a scientist friend of mine described how AI would speed up the process of coming up with and testing hypotheses in his field. Mundane work tasks will also take less time with the help of AI.
But there are also plenty of reasons to chafe against it. There’s the well-documented environmental impact of using ChatGPT. But with respect to Earth, this isn’t the element that has me wringing my hands the most. It’s not even that people are actively buying into a piece of technology that is likely to make many of their own jobs obsolete, or the way that the AI overviews on, say, a Google search often blithely give you straight-up wrong information. Nor the fact that the people at the forefront of the AI revolution have the crashingly terrible vibes of your classic tech bro loser.
Here’s the part I suspect may be too tragically reactionary of me: I am worried that a reliance on ChatGPT will erode people’s ability to use their brains. I do believe that the creative imagination in particular is a muscle, and one that is rewarding to exercise. Recently I was helping a seven-year-old work on her creative writing for school. She had to describe a forest, so I asked her to close her eyes and picture one, and tell me what she could see. Oh, we didn’t need to do that, she told me. We could just ask AI to make one.
I heard secondhand about an editor asking ChatGPT for help restructuring an article. And again, call me a luddite, but I just thought: no! Some things are supposed to be difficult! It is good for the brain to have to rise to a task! I read about someone using ChatGPT to order from a restaurant menu. It is one of the small joys of life to select what food you want to eat at a restaurant. Why cede that to a machine when you don’t have to?
But that’s not even the worst of it, in my view. The worst of it is the way ChatGPT seems to be creeping into people’s personal lives. Using ChatGPT to design a workout plan, to fix a problem in some coding or to summarise a dense document, fine, fine, fine. If you like. But when I hear about people using it to write a birthday card, a best man’s speech or a breakup text, a tiny part of my soul dies. And I don’t think this is the high and mighty position of someone who’s a writer by trade. None of these pieces of writing need to be perfectly expressed or grammatically flawless. They need to come from the heart and be real.
At the root of my hatred of ChatGPT is that people’s willingness to use it in this way implies they are happy to turn meaningful interactions like these into something transactional: a task to be completed efficiently and moved on from. So much of the value of, say, receiving a letter, whether emailed or in the post, comes from knowing that somebody sat down and thought about what to say. A human being spent some of their precious time and mental effort on communicating with you.
I am well aware that in 15 years’ time I may be wrapping up my seamlessly AI-optimised work day, turning to my AI-powered AutoSpouse and laughing at this article. How naive I was, worried about nothing! I love you, machine programmed to mimic love! I realise, too, that my hatred of ChatGPT might one day relegate me to the scrap heap in terms of future employment opportunities, for not knowing how to wrangle AI into doing things for me. Fine. I’ll go and live in the woods and be miserable. But I will be miserable in an analogue manner, and with my ability to think intact.
