There’s ‘bot’ to be an easier way to write
Information comes at us so fast and furiously these days that it’s impossible to take it all in. That’s why I’ve devised a simple test to cut through the chatter and determine what is truly important. If I can answer yes to at least one of the following questions, I know a news item is worthy of my time and attention: 1) Does it involve people named Harry and Meghan? 2) Does it involve people named William and Kate? and 3) Does it in any way pertain to infighting and/or inbreeding within the British royal family?
Which is why when I began to see stories about something called chatGPT I ignored them. Perhaps if the stories had been about someone called Lord chatGPT, the eight Earl of Twickinghamshire-on-Fuzzybottom I would have paid more attention. But the seemingly random collection of smooshed together upper- and lowercase letters along with the skewed consonant-to-vowel ratio made the name seem more techie than tea and crumpets.
That all changed when headlines began touting the remarkable capabilities of chatGPT. I’m pretty sure I heard that people were losing weight by following chatGPT-generated diets and that one person even used chatGPT to write their resume and now they are a U.S. congressman from Long Island. I began to suspect that chatGPT was more than just a winning entry in a high school science fair.
It turns out, chatGPT was developed by a San Francisco-based startup called OpenAI, whose sole mission, apparently, is to tack capital letters onto the ends of regular words. Actually, according to their website, it is a chatbot that “interacts in a conversational way.” I still had so many questions and none of them were answered when I learned that the name stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. Students around the country either don’t share those questions or don’t care because they have been busy using chatGPT to write their essays and other writing assignments since its debut in November.
That’s a problem, of course, because teachers have yet to figure out a reli
able way to determine whether a paper was written using the chatbot. Until that problem can be solved, many students will continue to take the easy way out. So instead of experiencing the tears, hair-pulling and random bloodletting that goes into producing an original piece of writing, they will spend their time watching TikTok videos. If that sounds like I am bitter, it’s because bitterness sounds a lot like jealousy.
As nice as it sounds to let a computer do the hard work for you, though, there are some drawbacks. Students who cheat this way aren’t learning how to write well. And if they don’t know how to write well, they can never hope to achieve the glamorous lifestyle of a newspaper columnist. I can assure you I didn’t become a wealthy jetsetter overnight. It took years of dedication to perfect the one skill that is key to good writing: procrastination. I probably could have perfected it in less time, but I kept putting it off.
One could argue that these students are honing their procrastination skills because the technology allows them to wait until the last minute before generating their assignment. But great writing is not so much about waiting until the last minute as it is about what you did while waiting until the last minute. Sure, any properly programmed chatbot can produce a sentence with a few quick keystrokes, but unless that chatbot has also taken the time to check the expiration dates on all the condiments in its refrigerator, played with the cat, and alphabetized their batteries, that sentence is going to be crap. I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who once asked, “If, before putting pen to paper, you haven’t scrolled through your Facebook feed until you’re reading posts from
2015, can it be said that you have written at all?”
It’s probably too much to hope for in this age of instant gratification that students will turn away from the lure of easy technology and embrace the all-consuming dread that comes with facing the blank page. But not knowing what to write has all sorts of benefits, from knowing that the space behind all your major appliances is squeaky clean to selfauditing your tax returns for the last five years. And don’t even get me started on the benefits of the editing process. But that’s only because I waited until the last minute and don’t have the time.