Beleaguered professors, who are largely poorly paid adjunct instructors at this point, will now have to not just contend with essay mills and good old-fashioned cut-and-paste plagiarism, but also the undetectable autograph of the robotic hand. However, the implications of ChatGPT-3, and especially whatever comes after it, are far bigger than first-year essays on gender dynamics in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Journalists, screenwriters, even novelists and poets, could now be replaced by the maw of ineffable code.
Our dread is not dissimilar to the anxiety amongst our friends in the visual arts who see a similar threat in the DALL-E program that generated reams of imagery for people on social media this autumn. Both sets of trepidations tap into something more elemental, that eternal sense that the machines we build to ameliorate our labor may instead end up snuffing out that which makes us exemplary.
The irony is that technologies themselves—simple rote tools—are largely neutral. It’s the way in which we organize our systems of production and consumption that makes all the difference.
There has been a surprising longevity to this rather specific fear. “For over a thousand years, human writers have been fascinated by the possibility of machines that can sing, dance and tell stories,” note computer scientists Mike Sharples and Rafael Perez y Perez in Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers. Examples of mechanical creatures producing prose are a bit scantier, though an argument could be made that that which is oracular, and which trades in oral literature mediated through prophecy, often has something a bit robotic about it, never more so than in the infamous deus ex machina, the “God from the Machine,” a device which arrived at the conclusion of classical drama to reconcile narrative conundrums.
Maybe more than the oracular feeling vaguely robotic, however, the opposite is true—that the robotic reminds us of the oracle. Sharples and Perez y Perez write that “authors through the ages have portrayed their craft as a mysterious creative process—inspired by dreams, motivated by primal urges, transforming lived experience into prose,” though I’d argue that the replacement of neurons with microchips doesn’t eliminate said mystery, but rather only transforms it.
If anything, ChatGPT-3 has something of the oracular about it; for as mysterious as the writing process of any author may be in all sorts of intangible and ineffable ways, any person who works in words also understands what’s prosaic and gritty (and thus all the more beautiful) about writing. There may be an alchemy of inspiration, but writing itself is done in the humdrum of deleting a sentence or rearranging a line, of careful research and editing.