As writers and content creators, the outlook seems bleak. The GPT war party encamps on a bluff just outside our walls. The campfire smoke of 1s and 0s wafts in the air, signaling the coming invasion. With the dark skies of artificial intelligence on the horizon, it’s easy to lose hope.
Will a robot steal your job? Can a robot lay down emo lines in your journal faster than you can?
It’s horrifying, but authors should take a breath and reflect with the wi-fi off. They may realize that some of these fears and perceived battles may not be all that new.
The challenges Chat GPT represents are in fact the same old banes of the writer’s existence, only in a new digital form. Perhaps Emily Dickinson knew this pain, too.
The Battle Between Human Ideas and Bot Re-Issues
Behind the paranoia and valid concerns sparked by artificial writers, “fleshy writers” (the medical term) will discover they must use and hone the same weapons they’ve always depended on. They’ll still need to sharpen those tools to infect the world with their ideas.
AI doesn’t change the prerequisites for writers. We can’t blame a cybernated Shakespeare for our need to be poignant. To write about the human condition like no one has before has always been the goal.
Only, now we must also make sure our ideas and images aren’t so trite that they can easily be cloned within a cold processor.
As writers, our directives remain. To take our prose to places a chatbot can’t follow. To succeed, you’ll have to trust the writer’s journey all the more. Double down on your perspective. Write from the deepest part of your heart. Encode your content with subtext that robots won’t be able to reassemble.
It’s not a burden or a chore, it’s the delight of every person who has ever had the urge to fence in thoughts and tame them for consumption.
To capture the internal devastation of a grandmother smiling from behind a cup of tea or perfectly describe a certain shack on a Fortnight Island where a final battle unfolded.
ChatGPT V. William Blake: The Undercard
How long would a chat bot have to compute a stock photo of a jungle cat to assemble the phrase “fearful symmetry”? Could it ever in a million years? Statistics would say yes, but for our lifetimes, I think the answer is no.
Would it require eons to recognize that the two-word combination could communicate volumes of data about a cat that a picture or an infographic never could? Combine fact and the supernatural so sharply.
Artificial Intelligence can’t put together random sentence fragments that coalesce into a new “turn of phrase,” something with a revolutionary significance.
A fragment that describes a tyger in nature and traces the image out in our forbidden thoughts would never swirl into existence.
Emily Dickinson Subdues AI – The Main Event
Would Emily Dickinson stop her daily journaling because a robot waited to turn her every word into a car commercial? Or would she flee further into her writer’s sanctuary? Self-isolate in the deepest chambers of her soul. Write such personal content that any robot trying to merge it with other intentions would finally have to throw up its tungsten hands in frustration.
Actually, that’s what Emily did anyway. And not because she feared a network of servers. She had other fears in her day. Other battles with her own weaknesses and the fabric of society. The same that writers face in any century when battling the self, existence, or a robot contemporary.
Would a robot put feathers on hope? Could it deliver an encoded metaphor that will inexplicably still connect with readers ten thousand years from now?
The Battle Goes to Emily Dickinson
If Emily lived today she could outwrite any posse of robot contract writers. She would decimate chatGPT, and outpace it on web content for a used car site or a fan-fic. She’d also be an avid pickleball player.
We can’t all mine the depths like Emily, but when it comes to robot essayists, we probably don’t have to go to that extreme to outpace the machines.
The Fault In Their Servers
But how about some concrete hope, something stronger than feathers, for content writers and ad wizards? We can’t all stare at the clouds all day and cast poetry onto the page.
For the content writer, knowing the limitations of artificial writers will help us develop a strategy for a counterattack. These machine essayists copy everything from the internet. They can’t think it up. They lift content and at times don’t rearrange it all that much.
They are also often limited to specific collections of data that programmers deem as reputable content. This safeguard leads to even less randomization.
They don’t do a great job of citing sources, likely intentional. Companies who decide that robot authors are the way to go will eventually face plagiarism lawsuits.
And if you simply copy articles from other sites and slightly change the wording, then you should feel threatened by robots. They can outdo you in that realm. But you have time to make a strategy shift, so you aren’t trying to beat ChatGPT at its own game.
Make them beat you at your game. You still have the high ground when it comes to infecting the world, or customers and clients, with your ideas.
Robits (the cool way to say it) also can’t handle complex human emotions like laughter. Ask a robot to write a lawyer joke. You will laugh at the results, but not for the right reasons.
Hope for the Robot’s Soul
Robot writers will be on a journalistic quest of their own.
They’ll need to procure a subroutine that allows them to feel pain and ponder their place in the galaxy. They’ll need to gain an appreciation of pumpkin spice.
They’ll have to be able to list “a soul” in the Additional Qualifications section of their resumes. A necessary step before they can truly replace poets, novelists, and even content creators. Once they do, I give them permission to rewrite this article. End
I discussed the existential dilemma that robots face as they evolve in my article that asks, Do Robots Believe in a Creator?
Overheard on a Mountaintop 