Zoe Cartwright loves a good work whinge – who doesn’t? But an experiment with ChatGPT made her reassess her perspective. Photo: Google Gemini – AI Generated.
As an experiment this week, my editor whacked a few prompts into ChatGPT to see if it could write my weekly column.
In less than five minutes it spat out 500 words on the dangers of the Aldi special aisle.
“Hey,” my editor said, “this is pretty good.”
Dear reader, it was pretty good – and produced work much faster (with fewer typos) than anything I could churn out.
But it wasn’t real. ChatGPT hadn’t experienced the siren song of the specials aisle, and it never would.
There was no real person out there with the precise perspective and opinions the AI espoused.
“So what,” you might think, “Harry Potter isn’t real either.”
While this is true, it misses something fundamental to the act of making anything at all.
Whether you write fiction or non-fiction (or silly little columns), make art or build houses, some part of yourself will leak into your work.
No matter how hard you try to edit it out, every time you create something you put a small piece of yourself out into the universe.
We’re social creatures who know ourselves, our world, and our place in it through the reflections we see from other people, so I think it’s pretty dang consequential if the stories and art we begin to consume are made by … no one at all.
Here’s another thing.
I read this week that AI can now research, write, assess and grade academic papers itself, potentially putting thousands of academics out of their jobs – or making them a million miles more efficient.
I have a sneaking suspicion that people who make a career out of academia might actually, on some level, enjoy doing those things.
I like to complain about having no good ideas, or too many deadlines, and getting myself to do the actual writing part of my job is like pulling teeth from a donkey, but deep down, secretly, I do enjoy it.
In the same way that a chippie feels a sense of accomplishment when he drives past a house he’s built, when someone talks about an article I wrote, I’m chuffed.
We are designed to make things and to interact with the things other people make.
Technology that helps us make things better or more easily, or that removes unnecessary labour (I’m looking lovingly at my washing machine) is a wonderful gift.
Technology that robs us of the joy (and frustration) of creating and connecting seems like something a little more ominous.
If we’re going to push back against it, maybe we need to admit to ourselves – and the people around us – that there are parts of our jobs we actually quite like doing ourselves.
