With ChatGPT all over the news, everyone who loves juvenile humor is an honorary francophone. It turns out that, spoken aloud, “ChatGPT” sounds like “Chat j’ai pété,” which translates to “Cat, I farted.”
This will likely be the greatest contribution that ChatGPT will make to society.
I see all sorts of articles worrying that ChatGPT will mark the end of human authors and writers—rather than paying people for work, Hollywood and publishers will pivot to exclusively producing computer generated scripts and novels.
I’ll ignore the ethical implications (because that aspect of the Plagiarism Bot bores me, and has already been better covered by others), and focus on why *I’m not worried* about being replaced by ChatGPT.
When I read and write, I’m looking for a human connection. It’s that simple. I’m interested in taking apart another person, understanding what makes them tick, how they think. The best program script in the world might be able to find and predict patterns in how words are arranged, but it won’t help me figure out how an individual person is thinking, and why.
More than that, something that relies exclusively on predictive capabilities has a weakness that will make it, by definition, incredibly boring. That weakness is the new, the novelty.
That’s why I’m not terribly concerned about ChatGPT transgressing into the world of novels and making any kind of a dent. The output will be more boring than a cat’s poot.
The bigger threats I see are more marketplace related. An endless mountain of low-content, written-by-a-click books will make it hard for people to find what they actually *want* to read, be it a novel story or nonfictional information.
You might think that nonfiction is more at risk from ChatGPT and generated text, but the program lacks an important piece of credibility—accountability, the personal expertise of the writer, the sources and experts vouching for the sources, and responsibility/consequences for someone giving bad info.
Regardless, it all goes back to that old motto: “Good, fast, cheap—pick two.” ChatGPT is certainly fast, and far cheaper than paying a human. So, I don’t expect its output to be any good.
And even if, in the future, the program is refined enough to write in a way that isn’t as cringe-worthy and artless as the current examples from it that I’ve been seeing?
I still won’t be interested, because there won’t be a person involved. The kind of readers I want for my own stuff, the kind of connection I hope to make through my writing—not the same audience at all for the Cat Farts.
