I am not sure if I am alone on this, but I am not the biggest fan of AI. I am not too familiar with all of the up-and-coming AI trends, except DALL-E Mini. A year or so ago it was trending online, and it became a meme on Instagram. I used to use it with my best friend when we’d study together at the library, and instead of working we’d use DALL-E Mini to generate pictures of Hagrid at Coachella, Pope Benedict XVI and Francis playing basketball, or President Biden surfing.
While I am not up-to-date with new AI trends, ChatGPT is certainly something that caught my attention. There’s been so much talk about it lately. This semester, each of my professors mentioned that using ChatGPT or any other AI writing tool is cheating. I like to play around with ChatGPT and see the random things it can come up with. Having a roommate who is a film major made this a fun process. We ran the theme of one of her scripts through Google Docs’s AI writing tool. We immediately found a major plot loophole that made the rest of the story obsolete. She was having trouble with a line in her script, so we ran the line through ChatGPT and asked it to reword it. It took that command literally, and just shuffled the words in the sentence around. It didn’t matter how many times we ran it through, asking it to leave words out, it never gave us what we wanted. After that experience, I think it is worth questioning its level of intelligence and ability to understand human creativity.
I came up with some fictional writing prompts for ChatGPT. I just finished watching the second season of Good Omens, and I asked it to write me a fight between the two main characters, Crowley and Aziraphale. I meant a verbal fight, not a physical altercation, but ChatGPT assumed the latter and told me that would be out of character for them. It honestly made me feel foolish. I clarified, and I got some funny banter. I asked it to write me a pitch for a sitcom, and it made me a show that looked cute: an ensemble cast of characters that are neighbors in an apartment building. It gave me a layout of the first season, and although it was cute, it looked like a network show that wouldn’t get renewed for a second season.
Both the fight between the characters from Good Omens and the sitcom plot were too easily put together, with any issues being resolved almost too perfectly. That is not always the way with books. There have been plenty of times where I have finished a book and thought to myself, that’s it? Normal People by Sally Rooney is an excellent example of a book that left me with that feeling. If ChatGPT had written Normal People, Marianne and Connell would have had a perfect storybook ending, unlike the realistic ending Rooney wrote. On the surface, ChatGPT’s stories could look like instant bestsellers, but I don’t think AI could write a novel that could impact me on an emotional level. It doesn’t have life experience.
Because AI surprised me with the fictional writing prompts I submitted, I wanted to test out another idea. So, I asked ChatGPT to write me some biographies for various famous people. I started with Mahatma Gandhi, and the result looked like his Wikipedia page. Then, to switch it up, I asked ChatGPT to tell me about Kylie Jenner, which came up in past tense. As she’s still alive, that weirded me out a bit. I reworded it, and it was in present tense. I also asked it to write me an article about fall fashion, and it just felt weirdly hollow to me. The article hit every conceivable fashion trend for fall, but there was just no personality to it.
Humans have been creating stories for centuries, and I don’t think we’ve run out of stories to tell just yet. In a world where every movie seems to be a sequel or a remake, it can seem that way, but I don’t think AI could ever truly understand the human condition, nor write a story as compelling and creative as a person could. That is not to say AI can’t be useful or capable of helping human creativity, I just cannot see it becoming a replacement for the real thing. That was proven to me when I sat with my roommate as she tried to use ChatGPT to help her script.