Why I Won't Stop Writing

Am I old fashioned?

Text-based large language models like Chat-GPT are getting better at writing coherent and grammatically correct sentences and using those sentences to write paragraphs, articles, and even books. It’s safe to say that Chat-GPT now writes in English better than most English speakers.

Given a prompt such as “Please write a thank you letter for a birthday present,” anyone can be the kind of rock star who takes the time to go beyond an exclamation point and emoji-filled note when they receive a gift or someone does something nice for them.

Or, with just a few minutes of prompting, a large language model will tell you the exact best words of sympathy to say when someone loses a pet or a loved one. It knows they’re the right words because it analyzed a lot of text, surely including many words of sympathy. By essentially taking the average of these it can come up with something decent, which will surely be better than what you could write yourself unless you had an hour or two to compose it.

Is that so bad?

Could a world in which emails are grammatically correct and free of spelling errors and where people send thank you notes be so bad — even if the actual process of text composition no longer requires any thought or effort?

I attended a webinar recently where a colleague was giving a talk about using Chat-GPT to generate content for the courses that he teaches to computer programmers. He demonstrated how easy and quick it was for him to write new courseware now, and said that he’s even learning more about the topics he teaches by asking Chat-GPT questions.

I left that meeting feeling conflicted. On one hand, a teacher’s job is to teach. So, the fact that he uses a tool to generate ideas, outlines, exercises, and slides shouldn’t bother me. But, as professional writer (and also an author of courseware), I did find myself scoffing and muttering to myself throughout the enthusiastic descriptions of surrendering to a soulless content generating machine.

On the other hand, if teachers have more time to teach and their teaching materials hardly take any time at all to update is that so bad?

Prompting is not writing.

I worry that content generation is a slippery slope. Once anyone discovers how easy it is to get something out of a content generating program what used to take them many hours of hard work, it’s easy to become comfortable with your new superpowers. I’ve heard people who are good writers say that they’ve transitioned from writing to “becoming an expert at asking the right questions” from Chat-GPT. This sounds a bit like saying, “I no longer cook, but you should see how good I am at ordering in a restaurant!” The two skills aren’t equal.

I’ve heard people brag about how they generate clever responses to posts on sites like Reddit or Quora using Chat-GPT and post them and they can do so much more posting now than ever before and it’s gaining them more followers.

Never gonna give writing up

It might be okay for someone who seeks only to gain followers and likes to use Chat-GPT, but I make my living from typing words in an order that I think up myself. What should I do? Should I stand my ground and stubbornly refuse to budge, even while constantly besieged by a flood of AI-generated newsletters, books, articles, text messages, marketing pitches, and social media posts that are all threatening to make the world think people who don’t use Chat-GPT are slow and uninformed? Or, should I give in “just a little” and try to figure out a way to make use of the new technology while convincing myself that I haven’t sacrificed my values or given up on the skill that I’ve worked so hard to hone for so many years?

For now, I’m sticking with stubborn and focused. I still believe that I can out-write anyone or any machine. But, at the same time, I’m working to learn as much as I can and somehow find a way to use this stuff to my advantage.