Thinking, Fast and Cheap
The danger of using ChatGPT
Lately, the same question keeps following me around:
“Have you heard about ChatGPT, and are you worried about your writing profession?”
For those who haven’t heard, OpenAI created ChatGPT — an artificial intelligence chatbot — and unleashed it upon the world in November 2022.
Since its release, ChatGPT has been on a vicious career-killing spree. The internet is now overflowing with eulogies of tweets and articles to its victims: copywriters, ghostwriters, coders, search engines, essayists and many others.
There are graveyards of content with headlines like: “Will ChatGPT automate the job of professional content writers?”, “A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business”, “Why Chat GPT Will Replace Humans for Marketing Copywriting.”
As an ad man, I roll my eyes at these headlines because I know human nature loves what is novel. When something shiny comes along, we scream our heads off and say, “This will change everything!” Only for a year to pass, and very little has changed (I’m looking at you web 3.0).
Sure, I’ll admit ChatGPT might be a game-changer. After all, the bot is pretty impressive. Its ability to generate paragraphs upon paragraphs on a topic at a press of a few keys is astounding.
I won’t bullshit you. If chatGPT had existed during my time in university, I would have, without a doubt, used it to write my psychology essays. Why waste time hacking out a 2500-word essay on The Importance of Brain and Cognitive Development in Children when I can generate this in seconds and play poker instead:
Perhaps the eulogies from the media are appropriate. Perhaps everyone will now outsource writing to ChatGPT, just like how we outsourced Maths to spreadsheets and calculators. Perhaps kids will stop asking their Maths teacher, “Miss… when will we ever solve a differential equation in real life?” and instead now ask their English teacher, “But Miss… why do we have to write essays? We’ve got ChatGPT.” Perhaps we don’t need to think and understand anything anymore because the totality of human knowledge is now pocket-sized.
While at university, my professors assigned an essay every week. This allowed them to gauge whether I had a deeper understanding of the topics taught. Ten years after graduating, I don’t remember any of the essays I wrote except one — The Philosophy of Psychology. Not because I understood the topic but because I regurgitated information I found on the internet without understanding a single word and achieving a 95% score. Now that may sound impressive, but it’s actually terrible.
The etymology of the word ‘essay’ means to attempt, explore, examine and dissect a piece of knowledge. But nothing about my time at university felt like exploration and examination but memorisation. And perhaps this is a reflection of the decline of true understanding. A decline that feels inevitable because access to knowledge is a few screen taps away.
I predict many will try and outsource writing to chatGPT. Would that be so bad? Well, 19-year-old Jason would bang his fist on the table and say, “a tool to save me time and churn out work? Sign me right up!” But present me thinks the exact opposite.
A trichotomy exists in this modern technocratic world: cheap, good and fast. You can only pick two out of the three. This trichotomy applies to food just as much as it applies to technology or advertising. You can have cheap, fast food, but it will not be good. You can have fast, good food, but it’s not going to be cheap. You can have cheap, good food, but it will not be fast.
And in this digital world obsessed with scalability (cheap) and efficiency (fast), the more we optimise for those two variables, the more we sacrifice quality (good).
Writing good essays requires laborious recall and personal synthesis of information which cannot be outsourced to a machine. As Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, once tweeted, “What people call good writing is actually good thinking, and of course, good thinkers are rare.”
Writing about something, anything, even the thing you think you understand well, shows you how much you actually know. Putting your ideas into words is often challenging. The first draft is often terrible, and sentences are rewritten over and over again until you can convey what you want to say.
Raging AI enthusiasts will argue you could get ChatGPT to write a basic structure, and then you edit and fill it out to your liking. Perhaps a new style of writing could emerge where you edit and tweak essays that chatGPT churns out. Sure, I hear you, and it does sound like a great idea.
Yet, writing is how we understand individually. To outsource this process is to live according to the language of others or, worse, to live through edits, tweaks and thoughts generated by an AI chatbot that knows everything but, in reality, knows nothing.
Writing ultimately teaches us how to think, how to organise and clarify our thoughts, how to find out what we know and don’t know, and how to understand ourselves and the world around us.
Writing has left a profound impact on my life. It helped me uncover who I was, what I believed, what my values were, and any other big dreaded existential questions that plagued my life. The act of showing up at my desk every day, opening the black Moleskine notebook and scratching out words with my 0.5mm Muji ballpoint pen as I attempt to answer life’s biggest questions has led me to a place of tranquillity. A place where I’m able to honour my past, treasure the present and shape my future within the lines of my notebook.
So am I worried about my writing profession? No, I’m not.
Sure, ChatGPT can write a bunch of words in less than 30 seconds, but so long as I’m breathing, thinking, exploring, attempting and synthesising, I’ll always have a quality advantage over any AI chatbot.
I hope you can see through the mediocrity of ChatGPT. I hope those who come across this understand that you can’t cut corners and that mastering a craft takes time and dedication. I hope those who plan to use ChatGPT know that it’s a mere tool to aid your writing and not something to rely on.
It’d be foolish of me not to admit that a new form of writing is arising. But at the end of the day, I think we’d still prefer to write our own thoughts.
