ChatGPT is excellent at stringing together plausible sounding writing. But in essence, it is pure BS. In a world where ChatGPT can churn out essays and stories in mere seconds, we need to ask: What does it mean to be human? Is there a difference between the art and the artist? Perhaps we should let AI kill the art.
ChatGPT Isn’t As Smart As You Think
ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns. It doesn’t think about what it writes. It merely creates an object from your prompts. Ask it to write a 1940s style detective story and it will. Ask it to add in Instagram, and it will do this too. It’s like a genie from another planet — one who does exactly what you want but has no idea of human culture.
Be a Human
What does it mean to be human. To seek art? When you write or draw, are you focused on creating a product (a story or image)? If only the end product matters, you may be eclipsed by the AIs of the world.
Calligrapher Jacqueline Svaren has this to say: “REJOICE IN HUMANNESS! Machines can’t make mistakes. If you compete with a machine on its terms YOU LOSE! So don’t reduce your writing to be like type. YOU ARE NOT A TYPEWRITER! Admit mistakes, correct them, & go right on.”
Mistakes are the one thing that ChatGPT is developed to eliminate. It strives to give better and more coherent answers. But mistakes and strange aquaintances of words can light the circuits in our brains.
Value the Process Over the Product
Do you exercise to be better looking? Or do you sweat and toil to get in touch with your body? The same goes for art. Do we create art to get in touch with our mind and spirit? Or do we simply produce a lot of “art objects”?
As artists and writers, creating is a journey. A way to discover more about ourselves and the world we live in. If it were only the end product, then I should really switch my artistic endeavors. It takes years to produce just one novel. Surely I could create more stories with a shorter form.
Yet as I embark on the journey, I find myself changed at the end. A different person than the one who started the novel.
AI might very well destroy some of the objects we produce as artists. But why did you sit at the keyboard in the first place? ChatGPT can emulate the objects but never the artist.
Tim Kane
