A Year of Creative Thinking<\/a> by Jessica Swale. The first page I flip to has us inventing new words for existing things. It\u2019s very fun. A cheese grater, I decide, could easily be known as a \u201cstinkchizzle\u201d. A very long road would be better as a \u201cslodgepuff\u201d. A fart becomes a \u201cpiffsnut\u201d, and a dream an \u201casterfantastic\u201d. I\u2019m pleased with that one. But how does the machine do?<\/p>\nFor cheesegrater it has scritchygrater, which is obviously crap. Very long road? Neverendipath. Bit literal. Trumpelsnort is pretty good, as is slumberwhim. I like nibblink for mouse. For some reason, I could only come up with \u201cpimpsquint\u201d.<\/p>\n
I think I\u2019ve got the edge \u2013 with a caveat. We\u2019re both doing pastiche. What about more complex writing?<\/p>\n
Time to up the ante: I copy and paste a huge selection of my own journalism into the chatbot, in the section that allows one to customise their own GPT. Naturally, I experience corrosive anxiety as I do. Hammering the lid of your own coffin closed used to be a physical impossibility \u2013 thank God for progress.<\/p>\n
RhikGPT, as it is now known, describes itself as sharp yet self-aware, with the ability to reflect on modern loneliness with humour. \u201cHow are you?\u201d I ask, nervously.<\/p>\n
The response is instant. Running on tea and curiosity. Mildly chaotic, but mostly cheerful, like a fox rifling through the recycling.<\/p>\n
Prickles run up my arm. Assonance, failed alliteration, a meaningless animal simile \u2026 It really does sound like me, a guinea pig stuck in a tuba.<\/p>\n
We land on an ambitious prompt. Write five sentences using the word \u201cheart\u201d in different contexts \u2013 literal or figurative \u2013 followed by a 200-word piece, that combines at least two of those ideas. In theory, the exercise favours me: I\u2019m the one bringing internal organs to a pen-fight.<\/p>\n
I go first. I teach a yearly creative writing week in Italy where we impress on students the value of specificity, and this is what I go for. Making an instinctive decision, I write a telling moment from an ambiguous love story between women who work in retail. Truthfully, I\u2019m pleased.<\/p>\n
This is my attempt at the exercise:<\/p>\n
Sara lay on the comforter, visualising the fluttering in her chest. Was this panic? It was frustrating that her mind kept returning to work. Like an itch \u2013 when she was on the sales floor, the day always took on a prickly heat.<\/p>\n
Quinn seemed to see straight through Sara. \u201cWhen a guy comes in that you like, you stand different,\u201d she had offered today, when Sara had only come over to re-fold cardigans. Then, as if playing a hand of cards, she\u2019d turned. Unfurled her neck exaggeratedly, rose-tattooed shoulders open. She wore an expression somehow stupid yet alert, goose-like. Sara had to suppress the impulse to laugh. Her mortification mixed with an unfamiliar sensation, which she didn\u2019t like. Not the feeling; the mystery of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you watching me?\u201d Her tone caught awkwardly, blushing the air. No response. It was the silence that now struck Sara as obscene. Quinn had resumed arranging her rail, infuriating half-smile curling the corner of her lips, like smoke.<\/p>\n
What if this was indigestion? Should she try some pink stuff? The caged flutter recalled the music her father played in his study. Skittering brush-like drums, that made her queasy. What if something was seriously wrong? Sara closed her eyes. If heartbeats are the percussion of our lives, she thought, then God hates jazz.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s RhikGPT\u2019s turn. It thinks for five seconds, then hammers out some paragraphs. My heart sinks. It sinks while I\u2019m laughing, a terrible feeling.<\/p>\n
The melancholy piece, about a trip to a florist, not only makes sense, it\u2019s funny. Sure, there\u2019s too many metaphors, some variable jokes. It\u2019s more compressed, strangely airless. But I do think many people would say the AI\u2019s piece is better:<\/p>\n
At the heart of town there\u2019s a florist whose roses look like sirens: all red mouth, all warning. I buy one because my chest feels unfurnished, an Airbnb between tenants. Outside, a bus screeches; a pigeon argues with a chip. A cellist saws at the air as if carving a door where no door exists, and for a second I believe in emergency exits.<\/p>\n
\u201cTake heart,\u201d my therapist says, which sounds like a shoplifting tip for feelings. I picture slipping courage under my coat and walking briskly past security. Instead I take the long way home, past kebab glitter and the nail bar named after an emotion. The rose keeps pricking my palm through the paper, a tiny curriculum in pain: focus sharpens you, but you\u2019ll leak a little.<\/p>\n
In the kitchen I put the flower in a mug that says WORLD\u2019S OKEST PERSON and it looks immediately improved by honesty. I text three friends I\u2019ve been avoiding and tell them nothing important, which turns out to be important. The city dims; the cello\u2019s phantom bow still rubs at silence. I want proof I\u2019m more than habit. I don\u2019t get proof. I get breath, and the small relief of doing one gentle thing on purpose. It\u2019s enough, for now. Take heart, I tell no one. I do.<\/p>\n
To be clear, I prefer mine. I think RhikGPT\u2019s piece is shallow and meaningless; a hung together list of stylish lines. It\u2019s facile. But AI illusions will improve, and any human editor can smooth them into a viable sense. This is a business and ethics decision, not an artistic one.<\/p>\n
So, can ChatGPT do my job? Is it better at writing?<\/p>\n
Yes, I think my job is probably over. But a job is not the same as writing.<\/p>\n
Writing is not ventriloquising. I think of it as embodied thought, and attentive readers can tell the difference. Of course my slowness and inconsistency make me less useful than AI within a mechanistic, capitalist worldview. I write to expand that worldview, if not destroy it utterly.<\/p>\n
At least, this is what I\u2019ll tell myself in five years, crawling through an Indonesian tin mine harvesting metals for microchips, when my AI boss doesn\u2019t even want my feedback on its poems. Very hurtful!<\/p>\n
Rhik Samadder is a columnist, playwright and performer, who co-runs The Tuscan Table, a creative writing retreat in Italy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every writer I know is in despair at the prospect being replaced by AI. Many of them say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-531558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}