Recently I signed on to ChatGPT and as an experiment asked it to write a book description of one of my novels. I gave it the barest minimum of information to work with, and in a few seconds it produced a short piece that I then shared with other members of the Authors Guild of Tennessee, of which I am a member. Some of them have read the book I used for this experiment (Pushing Back, the first book in the Boone Series). I asked their thoughts on the ethics of using AI to write things like descriptions of books, not to write the books themselves. I didn’t share my own thoughts about the question, wanting to get their reactions free of any influence my own spin on the issue might add.
The responses were immediate and varied. Some came in as a “reply all” response, and some were sent only to me. It was interesting to see which part of the question the responder chose to address. For example, several people who had read the book thought the description was accurate, maybe to the point of being a little eerie, responding to the accuracy of the product. Others who had also read the book were critical of the writing style, since it was noticeably different from the book itself, responding to the match (or lack thereof) between the style of the book description and the book content. Some thought the description was compelling enough to make them want to buy the book, while others found the language overblown, bordering on what one called “purple prose.” One thought the piece sounded like a student trying to impress their teacher, more flash than substance.
So, is it a marketing tool, an automation of what had until now been a purely human activity, or a part of the fundamental shift currently underway in the way we interact with the world?
The short answer, of course, is yes. It is all of those things, and probably more. My own initial reaction to the piece I asked it to write was that it was probably not something I would use due to the difference in writing style, but that it was very impressive as a summary/teaser for Pushing Back, especially since I did not provide any specific information about which book I was summarizing.
Any new technology offers, and sometimes requires, people to take a position. In my 70+ years on the planet I have seen it more than a few times. Over the Thanksgiving weekend I was visiting with my son’s family a few hundred miles away from where we live, and he took me for a ride in the old farm truck I had given him (which had been bought new by his great-great-grandfather in 1957). It has a manual transmission, crank windows, a throttle knob and choke knob on the dash, and no oil filter, which was at that time an option rather than standard equipment. He’s been restoring it and we took a short, noisy ride. I had driven to his house in my new Kia EV6, an all-electric vehicle. The contrast between the two was remarkable, to say the least.
I could share personal stories from other areas, like going from manual typewriters to the iMac I’m using to write this, and the fields of medicine, education, entertainment, food production, manufacturing, all have similar examples of astounding progress. I believe that the biggest change in my lifetime, however, has been in the area of communications. It’s difficult for me to imagine how much things would change if the internet was suddenly unavailable, and that technology is only a few decades old.
In my opinion, we are in a kind of shakedown period, where we as a society figure out how to incorporate this new way of communicating into our lives. It started with the internet, which I see as a watershed moment in our history. The ability to easily communicate worldwide in real time is just one tiny facet of its power. ChatGPT and its ilk are one more component of that change. While we can’t see it, primarily because we’re in the middle of it, this change will eventually be absorbed into our lives. We will figure out how to manage this new thing we have created. Pick an area – business, medicine, education, entertainment, transportation – and look back two or three decades. Things that seemed almost magical then are dismissed today as old and inefficient. Imagine doing business, both personal and corporate, primarily by mail.
The field I spent my career in, education, is sometimes good at preparing students for the previous century instead of the upcoming one, forbidding students to use tools they are certain to be required to use in their adult lives. Some teachers not so long ago were vocal in their opposition to students “just Googling stuff instead of doing real research,” when in fact the internet is arguably the greatest research tool yet conceived. It’s easy, fast, and the most useful way to use it is to be able to distinguish good information from bad.
I have said many times that art is what saves us, challenges us, pushes us forward, and I still believe this is true. One of the people I worked with some years back was a strict behaviorist who believed that not only the children’s misbehaviors we were dealing with could be reduced to stimulus/response, but so could all behavior. My response to him in one of our discussions was that if he could explain “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis in behavioral terms I might be convinced. Even if that incredible piece of music could be explained in terms of S/R, though, it would miss the point. Saying that the heart consists of muscle cells responding to electrical impulses, etc., is accurate, but misses the point that the heart is a pump that keeps us alive.
I do not think that ChatGPT is a threat to art. I do think that it is a powerful tool that we do not yet know how to use. If what it produces can be seen as a beginning point in our creative process instead of the end point, there is great potential for new and better writing for us as both creators and readers.