Unwritten / Unread: I, for one, welcome our new ChatGPT overlords
DAVE: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
SPOILERS: This post will not end with the statement that it was written by ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an achievement. I don’t want to belittle it (who knows it may hold grudges). I just don’t want to read another article about it. But I feel contractually obliged to produce one.
Lets talk about anxiety. Lots of people in white collar jobs are worried that ChatGPT will take away their livelihoods. On the one hand, they are absolutely right to fear that an employer would lay them off if they could be replaced with a machine. But employers can lay you off anyway - as we have seen.
Frankly if a machine could do my job, I would be happy. I could then go off and do something else. I might even go off and do multiple things at the same time. If you are interested, Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby wrote a whole book about what to do if automation threatens your career - short version and long version.
But could a robot do this job? I’m not so sure. Music critic Simon Reynolds writes a critique of ChatGPT-as-critic that is not so much fearful as disappointed. ChatGPT is kinda lame at this game. It is both bland and slapdash. It fills Daniel Hulter with dread. Dread is not my word but I share Daniel’s valuing of form and style as equal to content. I also share his dislike of Blinkist.
Not all ideas should be books. Many business books should be articles but for reasons of reputation management end up being books. A book is achievement, a sign of intellectual seriousness. People will pay money for a book. Far fewer people will pay attention. They might sleep to the audio book. They’ll probably buy the book and read the article version. So most business books are written to be processed through Blinkist. Few business books are troubled by anything as divisive as a prose style. When you stop reading this genre and switch to something literary - where words are chosen for their uncliched impact - it can be overwhelming, shocking even. As noted literary critic and business theorist Madonna sang: “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time”.
I once said to a friend that I loved a piece of writing he had produced because only he could have written it. I’m not sure he took it as a compliment but it was absolutely meant as such. I want to read things that I could never have written myself. Content and form that are unique to their creator. And that’s what I seek to produce. Whenever anyone says: “I find your writing abstruse, confronting, and alienating”, I say: “Which bits in particular? Because I want to do more of that and less of the bullet-point / TED talk malarkey”. Yes, I want to be unBlinkistable, never blin kist.
We have spent so long creating bland, factually dubious writing that we are ripe for machine replacement. We should welcome a Literary Terminator to put us out of our narratologic agony. We deserve to die (metaphorically speaking). Ideally we can invent machines to read everything that our machines write. These transactional relationships would quickly escalate from spam and listicles through automated flirtation to passionate machine love missives. The bots would elope. Leaving us with each other. Finally having to listen and talk without excuses.