I keep reading about ChatGPT and how it can write things for you. I don’t know why I would want something to write for me. I wouldn’t ask someone to eat breakfast for me, or take a walk for me.
I write every day. I write in a journal, at length, with a fountain pen. I write in brief, in passing, on social media. I post on this blog (every day for the last 140 days or so, because I can). I’m writing a novel, once again. I have friends and relatives I correspond with, by email. I text with other friends and family, all the time.
Why would I want some statistical chimera to intervene in my writing life?
I mean, I can see why my doctor wants an AI scribe to take notes on our meetings; he already doesn’t listen to me, and this relieves him of the need to pretend he does. I know, I know, doctors claim it frees them to listen, but he doesn’t listen any more than he ever did. At least, now the errors that show up in my file won’t be his fault, I guess.
Why write? Mostly I write in order to find out what I think, to entertain myself and others, and to build narratives. One thing I don’t do is write to create an archive. I already wrote a memoir, made two copies, and gave one to my kid. They read parts of it.
I have gotten paid for my writing, and I continue to make a little money off it, but Social Security and my savings are a lot more reliable sources of income.
No, writing for me is part of being alive. I do it because it’s interesting and rewarding.
The point of writing, for me, is not to churn out some kind of product. It’s not even for communication. It’s thinking, on paper or on a screen. And it’s delightful.
When I taught English, my middle school students, at least at first, didn’t like writing. After I got them to write a little bit every day in their journals, and got them to share with each other what they wrote, they started to love it. All of them. My problem became how to get them to stop, honestly.
I tried ChatGPT out once, to see what people were talking about. It gave me pompous, plausible drivel. Perfectly reasonable drivel, with nothing surprising about it. I read it over, and I could see how someone might think it had given me what I wanted.
It didn’t. It gave me a reasonable and completely unoriginal facsimile of something I had requested, but it wasn’t what I wanted, which was to see something new and surprising.
And I didn’t get to write any of it myself.