Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type;
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If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
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take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland.
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engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story.
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The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.
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In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.
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I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.
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a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate.
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A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language.
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What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.
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As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills;
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Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
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We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?
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The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read.