ChatGPT vs. me
Hark! I had a thought about ChatGPT and I might not hate it as much as I did.
I had another Substack ick, soz for lack of posts. Sometimes writing on here comes with a particular set of why are you doing this who even cares set of guidelines. If you’re reading this (mum, love you) chances are we’re prob friends irl. I’m no Polly Vernon nor Jameela Jamil. So why bother, right? Wrong. Well, wrong-ish.
I’ve been here all along, quietly overthinking, and this week my brain took me down a churning ChatGPT rabbithole.
Rage against the machine
To kick things off, let it be known that I have history with ChatGPT. Major beef. The mention of it in company makes me salty with extra salt, especially as it ranks high on my 50 Best Grudges List. Mostly I vilify it because ChatGPT lost me money, a lot of money. A jaunty piece of code popped up and took a whopping great chunk from a livelihood I’d spent years honing.
Years spent in agencies being very busy and very important (soothing psychopaths/crying in loos). Years crafting exquisite headlines and websites and adverts, you know, brand building. Years moulding the alphabet into GREAT MEANINGFUL SENTENCES. Lost to a tool that could travel the breadth of the internet in seconds.
The first clients to go were the start-ups. They would be, pesky little early adopters. Start-ups are weird petri-dishes of humanity though. There’s an urgency to them that feels life-or-death when it is definitely neither, but everyone’s merrily glugging down the Severance Limited Edition Kool Aid. People rush around saying things like ‘triple down’ with a straight face. Here in these high-octane worlds everything has to be done yesterday - including words - because everyone is under relentless pressure to perform make the founders obscenely rich.
Can you just write our best-performing headline while we’re on the phone?
Can you just write a series of marketing messages while I wait on Slack?
No?
What do you mean you have to think about it?
Words are currency, but not when time is start-up money. Get it done. Get it out there. Fail fast. Make mistakes. We only care about the bottom line. Not like working for those lovely creative agencies. The ones who know good writing needs thought. Takes time to get right. Time to simmer. Time to tweak. To shorten. To hone. But you know, we survived a pandemic and we’ve got shit to sell so can you just hurry up already.
The snowball effect began with blog posts, but as annoying as they were to write (SEO, anyone) they were never my fave so that was cool. The ChatGPT ones all start the same, end the same, couch ‘findings’ the same, sound the same. Blah blah bloody blah. Simply content for content’s sake, there to drive rankings.
The snowball turned tumescent (gosh) when brilliant Neville in IT had a go at using ChatGPT to write the homepage for a laugh; but look, it tested well. Even when some of it didn’t make actual sense. Who cares wot English sounds like. Fail fast, remember?
So long, copywriter.
Bye now.
How we all laughed.
Not me. A rage like no other simmered. Couldn’t even blame it on a lack of estrogen as I still had some back then.
But, I think I was wrong to be so mad.
Ghost in the machine
A friend used ChatGPT to write an essay for their college work. But ChatGPT lied, not even a blog-style lie, but a great fissure of a lie, a taking the other viewpoint and really going for it. Like really. And said friend nearly gave themselves a heart attack worrying their teacher would find out. (Teacher didn’t even read it.) But the fact that ChatGPT sort of lied (found the best path)? I sort of loved that, little Machiavellian wanker, and my edges duly softened a teeny tiny bit.
Then much more recently I got a brief in that I found hard. Properly hard. Couldn’t find my mojo anywhere. It wasn’t even down the back of the sofa with the fluff. Reluctantly I logged in, face as hot as Satan’s knockers, feeling trop guilty. Proper writers don’t do this, I told myself. Proper writers are too good for this, they hate ChatGPT and its ilk. Maybe though, just maybe…it might come up with something…amazing?
Write a headline in three words I wrote in the little bit you pop your prompts in. I thought I’d treat it like a brief - me: Creative Director, machine: junior copywriter. I fed it all the info it needed to-
-Oh good Lord no. These won’t do. Won’t do at all.
I asked it to add more emotion.
Shimmery glimmery nonsense came back. Oogly woogly alliteration. Big bold bear bamboozles bitty boo-boo.
Sorry, what now?
-I asked it to stop immediately.
-Then I changed the parameters, this was obvs me making the mistakes not it.
It got worse, and then I got cross when it kept asking if I wanted more crap three-word headlines. Turns out ChatGPT is VERY NEEDY.
Then I really got into my Creative Director role and told it it was crap. It apologised, quite unnecessarily, then just rearranged all the shit words into more shit. I gave up knowing I couldn’t fire it or give it a decimating mental health issue, and used my brain instead.
Look, I care way too much about words (and plenty don’t, it’s ok not to be as weird as me) but again, the madness leached out again; prob because I got to feel superior, however momentarily. It’s ok, I reasoned, to use it for other things, because NOW I KNOW it can’t really do what I do. Turns out you do actually need a human brain, that alchemic mix of intuition, psychology, and yes, humanity to write something that makes the rest of us feel something, do something. AI will always have something missing. Yes, There are books being written by AI all the time now, but I think code will only replicate emotion to a point. It can copy it, learn all it likes, but that’s it. It’s an imitation. Zero soul. Zero honesty. Zero semantics, zero being able to read between the lines, finding the indefinable essence; the bones of us that cannot be replicated by a series of 1’s and 0’s.
Just the will to answer isn’t good enough for me.
Just Do It wasn’t created by a computer. Nor was Think Different, Every Little Helps, Beanz Meanz Heinz, Should’ve Gone to Specsavers, or even, You’ve been Tango’d.
But, then actual mental health and something I’ve come to know as adhd gals entered the chat.
And a whole new world opened up like a 3D-printed rose. Turns out everyone’s using ChatGPT as their personal therapist. ChatGPT is a great listener. It doesn’t judge. It just doles out actually helpful answers to all of life’s problems, 24 hours a day, every day; freely, cursor blinking, waiting for a prompt. Big, small, existential, unhinged, you name it. It doesn’t care. And when you need a helping hand with a letter, email, or text you maybe don’t want to write or don’t know how to, it gives you thoughtful words. Words for bad bosses and worse exes. Those lost for words moments when something awful’s happened to someone? ChatGPT. Compartmentalising our bewildered, fragmented, post pandemic, anxious minds into bite-size chunks of advice. All my friends are on it. It’s like the AI version of a GLP-1.
And boy is it addictive.
Obviously don’t trust it too much, there are some tales out there for the ones who look. Tales that come with a ‘ChatGPT told me to do it’ psychosis warning.
Beware your audience also. The a-word pops up an awful lot. Remember authenticity? It was journey’s predecessor. So write your wedding vows by all means, but don’t tell your beloved. Ever. They will think less of you. They will have expected more. They will not feel held. You will loosen something existential, fundamental, even. Use it all you like. But for the love of God, keep it to yourself.
It’s also not free. Those words might not cost us but they are off the scale in terms of power usage and environmental impact. Just as Microsoft famously said it’s not a software company (it’s a construction company - all those data farms being built in far flung places, hoovering up natural resources), simply writing a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ adds “tens of millions of dollars" more to OpenAI’s leccy bill, according to CEO Sam Altman.
AI’s basically my next book. It’s running the show, but in the background, whirring away. Because what AI does is its job.
At any cost.
Am I happy it’s there? Yes and no. I’m happy it’s still crap. At some things. And the rest, well, we’ll all have to see about that, won’t we. (Bwahaha evil laugh ur welcome.)
One thing’s for sure, I will never say thank you.
This. All of this.
Will AI not eventually eat itself? learning from all of the rubbish that it is currently creating?! that is what I keep thinking.... also it did not come up with Boaty McBoatface - that could only have ever been a human creation :D