ChatGPT, So Hot Right Now

“A wise man can get more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”

                        – Baltasar Gracian

They’ve done it.  They went and ruined my writing career before it ever had a chance, and they don’t even care.  “They” in this case being the developers of ChatGPT, which depending on your viewpoint is either the first step into a beautiful new age of AI-supported utopia or the vanguard of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  For how short it’s been on the scene, it’s amazing how quickly ChatGPT has poked the hornet’s nest. 

For those not in the know, ChatGPT is an online tool people can chat with to figure stuff out.  Think of it like the next generation of Google, or what you wish Siri was actually like.  It’s quite amazing how authentic the machine sounds, and it’s capable of some truly fascinating things.  I asked it to give me a literary comparison between Hamlet and Sharknado, and after trying to convince me that comparing the two was idiotic, ChatGPT gave a shockingly decent go at it (common themes between the two are revenge and man vs nature, if you’re curious).  The most intriguing part for me is how conversational the whole experience was.  I typed my questions like I was chatting with a real person, and the machine responded in kind.  This is no customer service bot struggling to understand why you’re upset your package never showed up.  ChatGPT covers down on anything shy of politics and war, which it is hard coded against at the moment.

Personally, I don’t think ChatGPT has destroyed anything yet, but you can see where it does from here.  A lot of the furor online revolves around people claiming the essay as a school assignment is dead, since students can just plug prompts into ChatGPT and copy the results.  After playing with it a bit, I think there’s some validity to this concern.  It will take a bit to get there, both in terms of the platform’s capability and students’ awareness of it, but the artificial writing is on the wall.

What concerns me more is whether ChatGPT or something like it can take over writing fiction.  Would-be authors have already saturated the market, and algorithms churning out decent products at the speed of silicon might mean the death of small time authors.  I was hoping people overreacted to this threat, but then I asked ChatGPT to give me an idea for a political intrigue novel in a fantasy world.  In a few seconds, the machine spat out a run-of-the-mill—but infinitely serviceable—storyline involving a young champion of the people leading a rebellion against council of corrupt sorcerers desperately clinging to power.  It’s not hard to see how this becomes the norm as new authors realize how hard it is to write and lean on ChatGPT as a crutch.  Eventually, that crutch becomes an electric scooter and Wall-E becomes a prophetic metaphor for the world of writing fiction.

In the meantime, I want to keep playing with the tool.  Sure, it could mean the death of my hopes as an author, but it’s still fun to see what the computer comes up with.  I’ve asked it for book title recommendations, help with developing elevator pitches, and idea generation.  I want to see just how far I can take it as I edit my current novel and see what comes out of a blending of capabilities. 

As the saying goes, work smarter not harder.