Caveat: I realize that ChatGPT can do everything from writing code to solving math problems step by step. But for the purposes of this discussion, I’m focusing on ChatGPT’s content creation function.
I started writing in grade school. As a participant in the Young Authors program in Washington State (where my family lived for three years), I wrote and illustrated short chapter books and participated in an all-day writers’ conference. My mom typed the manuscripts, sewed the pages together, and bound the book using fabric-covered cardboard. Nearly 40 years later, the laminated endpapers are yellowed and cracked, but I still remember going to the fabric store to choose something “cool” for the covers. As you can see from my author’s bio, being a writer was a big part of my identity even when I was a very little kid.
By the end of my second year in college, I was getting paid to write. I worked at a think tank, summarizing speeches for their monthly print newsletter. Since then I’ve been a book editor and a magazine editor. A proofreader, a content strategist and a ghost writer. I have written copy for social media and edited the micro-copy in apps. I have measured out my life in words. In fact, I’m often paid by the word. So it’s no wonder that people started asking me questions about ChatGPT as soon as it debuted.
At first, I was uncomfortable talking about it, but I couldn’t figure out why. I read a lot of articles and listened to a lot of podcasts, trying to understand my misgivings. I wasn’t worried about being displaced: The kind of people who use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate content are not my ideal client. I wasn’t confused by the technology: I’ve messed around with AI-driven writing tools a bit and understand their potential. So what was it? It took writing this essay this week to figure it out.
The reason ChatGPT bothers me so much, I finally realized, is that it mistakenly assumes that the most important product of writing is a series of words strung together in proper syntax.
Feeding a prompt into a large language model that produces content as output is a cool party trick. But it misses the point. ChatGPT is ass-backwards. You give it an idea and it spits out a grammatical text to communicate that idea. But when humans write, we don’t just communicate ideas, we generate them.
ChaptGPT can’t do that. It doesn’t create new ideas; it regurgitates old ones. It relies on status quo thinking, rearranging stuff that already exists. As Ted Chiang wrote in a recent article in The New Yorker, “ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of all of the text on the web.” Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., said something similar. He calls GPT-3, the system under the hood of ChatGPT, “the king of pastiche.” “It’s a kind of glorified cut and paste,” Marcus explains, but he also warns that it’s incredibly dangerous. I like to think of ChatGPT as a bulimic bot. It ingests a bunch of stuff and then vomits it back up without digesting any of it.
It’s this copycat aspect of ChatGPT that has people worried about academic plagiarism. What will become of the five-paragraph essay? Won’t every kid use ChatGPT to write their college admissions essays? As a parent and a writer, I heard those alarm bells ringing loud and clear.
But like John Warner, an author, editor, and writing teacher, I believe high school English as we currently know isn’t doing our kids any favors anyway. Warner’s not a fan of five-paragraph essays or rewarding students for being proficient bullshiters, and I agree. (You can read his epic Twitter thread here.) “We made a mistake thinking it was a good thing to train students to write like an algorithm,” he explains. And the dawn of ChatGPT has shown us the error of our ways.
Ah, I realized. There’s the rub. The shlock that ChatGPT produces is plausible, but it’s not passionate. It answers your questions, but it doesn’t have a voice. Which is why I agree with Warner when he says ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving.
When we focus on the output of writing (i.e., text) instead of the writing process, we miss out on the most important parts of writing: the research, the rewriting, the struggle to connect the dots. That’s work everyone can benefit from doing—even if no one ever reads what you write. Because while the folks at OpenAI treat writing like just another tech product, those of us who do it every day realize it’s so much more.
Writing is meditation (Julia Cameron), a form of prayer (Franz Kafka), and a way to figure out what you think (Edward Albee). It is, as the author and cartoonist Lynda Barry has explained, “the formless thing which gives things form.”
ChatGPT raises real concerns about factual accuracy and the dangers of giving bad actors the ability to produce misinformation on a massive scale for free. But it’s dangerous in other ways, too. We can’t overlook what this hullabaloo reveals about our fundamental misunderstandings about the benefits of writing. Think about times when you’ve made a list of pros and cons, prepared talking points for a job interview, or written a letter to apologize or offer condolences. The act of putting pen to paper is what helps you discover your own priorities, hopes, fears, and epiphanies.
Don’t write like a writer—think like a writer
ChatGPT tempts us to focus on the wrong thing. Writing like a writer, I would argue, is much less important than thinking like a writer. And how do you learn to do the latter? By developing a writing habit. Journaling is the least formal type of writing and a great place to start. It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are three simple approaches that I love.
#1 Morning Pages
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, calls Morning Pages a form of meditation. “Unlike conventional meditation which lulls the practitioner into calm,” she says. “Morning Pages spark the practitioner into action.” Here’s how they work.
Buy a notebook that you use exclusively for Morning Pages. (If you try to do this on a laptop, you’ll get distracted.)
Write three longhand pages every morning before you do anything else. Close the notebook.
“Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page,” says Cameron. Write about anything and everything that crosses your mind. “And then do three more pages tomorrow.”
On days when I feel especially anxious, this method of “braindumping” is a game-changer.
#2 The Daily Diary
If the idea of filling three pages doesn’t appeal to you or you’ve struggled to journal in the past, you might like Lynda Barry’s four-square method better. The cartoonist and author explains her method in her trippy book, Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor. Most of us have tried to keep a diary only to have it go one of two ways,” she explains. “Either an obituary-like recounting of events or a hamster wheel of feelings of worry and dissatisfaction with other people.” The Daily Diary is quite different.
Buy a marble composition book (or something similar). Draw a vertical line down the page and then a horizontal one, dividing the page into four frames.
Label each frame as shown on the yellow page below: Did, saw, heard, draw.
Fill the frames, recording what you did, saw, and heard on the previous day. When you get stuck, doodle in the “draw” space. (Disclaimer: The draw space makes me self-conscious and distracts me. So I use the lower-right quadrant to record any epiphanies, decisions, etc.)
#3 One Line a Day: A Five-Year Memory Book
One Line a Day is marketed as the easiest way to build a daily journaling habit. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but you should also know that each page includes a blank line for five successive years. A friend of mine has uses this book and enjoys looking back at her thoughts from previous years without having to turn a page. She also loves how easy it is. “It’s so short. There’s no pressure,” she explains. “It’s good for someone intimidated by the idea of commitment of journaling.”
As with most new habits, consistency is more important than quality when you’re learning to think like a writer. Buy a pen you love to make writing even more enjoyable. And remember, none of these methods will produce content for other people to consume. That’s not the point. The point is to produce clarity for you. The idea is to get your thoughts out of your head and onto a page, where they can begin to take shape. To paraphrase Louis L’Amour, writing opens the faucet so your thoughts and ideas can start flowing. And that’s when the magic happens. Write about your personal life or your career, what you’re reading and what you’re planning, the things you dread and the things you cherish.
When I sat down to write this, I was having a hard time articulating what bothers me about ChatGPT. But after a few hours of thinking and writing and rewriting, I understand exactly how I feel. No chatbot can do that for you.
Also on my mind
A New Jersey restaurant called Nettie’s House of Spaghetti recently banned children from its establishment, igniting a firestorm. While the restaurant received plenty of support when it announced its new policy on social media, Jessica Blankenship, who wrote about it in Bon Appétit’s restaurant column, believes most people missed the point: “Dining has never been a matter of an individual's experience,” she explains. “It's a collective one.”
Speaking of restaurants, this NYT opinion piece explains that the cost of eating out has long been subsidized by labor abuses, and asks: what if we cared as much about the well-being of the people who serve our food as we do about the animals that end up on our plates?
I attended the funeral of an old friend’s 19-year-old son two weeks ago. I can’t remember exactly what I said to her in the receiving line, but after reading Colin Campbell’s essay about losing both of his children in a car accident, I hope I didn’t say “There are no words,” which Campbell says should be strictly verboten. His “grief spiel” provides three incredibly helpful guidelines for meaningful conversation in the face of unfathomable loss.
Is anyone surprised to learn that how you feel about your job affects the way you parent? I wasn’t.
What kind of perfectionist are you? I’m not sure I agree with my quiz results, but I still found this article really intriguing.
There have been some great profiles and interviews with big personalities lately: Esther Perel, Will Shortz, and Jeremy Strong.
The results from the UK’s four-day workweek experiment, which ran from June to December 2022 are already in. The 70-page pdf is not for the faint of heart, but the executive summary is only 3 pages long. The upshot? “The trial was a resounding success.”
The Dill Top from Stuad ($185) is an incredibly versatile shirt that’s worth the splurge and perfect for spring. (I own it in black and white.)
I’m not sure which I love more: the fact that A24 auctions off all these props from fabulous films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, or that they donate the proceeds to good causes like the Laundry Workers Center. (As I type this, the current bid for the hot dog hands is $17,000!)
There’s a lot to make fun of in this fashion video, but I still found the framework of this closet editing system pretty helpful.