HHow tall is the Eiffel Tower? What can you cook with semolina and a handful of pickles? Is a hippopotamus stronger than an elephant? If you have 10 words and a question mark, ChatGPT will respond using its vast training data and magical ability to guess the most likely next word, word by word. The answer sounds reliable, and in some cases even accurate.
Artificial intelligence text generation tools are already widely used to answer all kinds of questions, but they are increasingly being used as an alternative to writing. According to a study published by OpenAI, 10.6% of requests to ChatGPT included requests to edit or critique text, and 1.4% involved writing fiction.
Even more surprising, in 8% of cases, ChatGPT users requested that a text or personal message be written on their behalf. The authors of these lines can attest to this. He witnesses teenagers answering journalists’ questions by explicitly executing responses through ChatGPT, and listens to young couples in long-distance relationships with chatbots, like Christian repeating the words of Cyrano. It’s a way to delegate the task of shaping your thoughts to a text generator, just as we’ve long delegated spelling correction to software.
delegate thinking
But writing is not just about communicating. It’s also something to think about. In a recent magazine interview Usbek & Rikaphilosopher Eric Sadin laments that “billions of people” have used these technologies as an opportunity to stop exercising “basic abilities, especially the ability to speak and write in the first person.” He continues: “Do we understand that a life deprived of the fulfillment of one’s abilities and positive connections with others only breeds sadness, bitterness, and madness?”
“Writers don’t just write words,” writes Ed Zitron, an American author who specializes in artificial intelligence, in his book The Case Against Generative AI. “It juxtaposes ideas and ideals and emotions and thoughts and facts and emotions (…). Good writing is (…) a battle that is at least moved or inspired by a given emotion. This is something that AI simply cannot reproduce.”
This article has 57.04% remaining. The rest are exclusive to subscribers.
