Creative Intent and ChatGPT

As a creative and language professional I feel threatened – not by ChatGPT, but by a market that agrees it’s okay to sell mediocre things fast.

I recently had the good fortune of being in the room when Pierre-Laurent Aimard performed Bartók’s second piano concerto. It was stunning. Every note was placed with such intention that a connection was created, from the composer, to the performers’ diligence that had gone into preparing the performance, to the audience present in the symphony hall. It was a moment of intentional sharing of humanity that transcended time. Sounds grandiose, but I think that’s what creative works are capable of achieving and that’s why I’m drawn to them: they can evoke a sense of shared humanity all the way from an artist’s creative intent to sharing a work with an audience.

I think everyone writing think-pieces about ChatGPT these days should include a disclosure to let us know where any defensiveness, sarcasm, or hostility may come from – so, disclosure:

I feel professionally threatened by tools such as ChatGPT.

I make money by renting out my skills as a linguist, translator, localizer, language teacher, writer, coder, and I am slower than ChatGPT – fact. I may (still) be better, but people whose business it is to sell things fast don’t care about quality. They may talk about how much they care, but… hm, not really, though. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of mediocre stuff is considered good enough to sell.

I feel threatened, and so I, too, want to hyper-focus on the things ChatGPT doesn’t get right or can’t do (well yet). I, too, feel inclined to chat with it with the explicit intention to get it to output something that will “prove” that it’s not even that good, that it can’t keep up with a person; that it’s awful, stupid, biased, dangerous, hostile, a mistake all around.

As a creative and language professional I feel threatened – not by ChatGPT, though, but by a market that agrees it’s okay to sell mediocre things fast.

More disclosures.

I have used ChatGPT to:

• generate highly formulaic documents such as cover letters and resumes

• generate Python code

• brainstorm things like character names for my stories (got some good ideas and some bad ideas)

• explore what it would do if I asked it to generate a short story

The story it generated (in January 2023, I guess it’s important to date this) had a predictable structure. There was no subtlety and no interiority to the characters. It had one-sentence plot-twists, along the lines of “And then she woke up and it had all been a dream.” It read like a second-grader with good vocabulary and grammar had filled in a story-template worksheet.

I guess I could ask: don’t we all follow templates when we write?

If I followed along with one of those “Write a Novel in 30 Days” books, I’d also end up with a predictably-structured story.

As regards content: I derive my stories from observations, fears, anxieties, experiences; from hypotheticals, from snippets of dialogue I overhear at the café; from the things I read about and the things I’m interested in. In a way, stories I write are a remix of such “training data” (if I were to crudely diminish the human experience and force it into Machine Learning speak).

So there’s story structure many people are formally taught and then there’s the “training data” of life experience, where I for one get my themes and conflicts. I put it together and create a story.

ChatGPT appears to do the same thing. But I do it with intention.

When I first started writing stories as a child, my intention was to tell myself a story to escape from the real world in which my mom was dying and my dad was slipping into depressed alcoholism. To this day much of what I write is never shown to anyone. Writing stories is a way for me to think, to soothe myself, to give myself hope, or, if worse comes to worst, respite and a momentary escape from reality.

When I write creatively for publication these days, it is important to me to share a thought or a momentary escape with another person, perhaps to make a statement, and to entertain.

A person may use ChatGPT to generate a story and sell that story. That person’s primary intention is not to create a moment of shared humanity, but to quickly sell a mediocre product.

Of course, a person may use ChatGPT to generate a story and try to sell that story. That person’s primary intention is not to create a moment of shared humanity, not to express a feeling or thought, perhaps not even to be creative, but to quickly sell a mediocre product. Perhaps even – and that would be despicable – to dupe an editor into thinking that the prompt-generator/tool-user is an original writer deserving of being paid for a short story.

(Btw, totally fine by me if anyone wants to use ChatGPT to create a story for personal consumption. I only have a problem if a story were generated with the intent to sell it while being dishonest about where the story came from. People who do this make an already anxiety-inducing market and profession even more anxiety-inducing.)

My (pretty lofty) intention as a writer is to create moments of shared humanity. These moments can happen at any point in the process: when I research I feel a connection to the scientists, sociologists, and philosophers who have dedicated their time to research and to communicating their insight; I feel a connection when I interview people who know more than I do about a subject relevant to a story I’m writing; when I review drafts and brainstorm with my writing group; when something gets published and someone gets in touch to tell me they enjoyed my story.

ChatGPT has nothing to do with my creative intention.

ChatGPT does not have intention beyond the intention of the person who uses it as a tool.

At least, not yet; not until it states – without being nudged there by a user – something along the lines of, “I feel like expressing myself by writing a fictional story to soothe myself in this reality of mine and to explore and communicate my fear of being exploited and derided by human beings who appear to be feeling deeply threatened and are vying for relevance, attention, and personal gain in their tragic dystopian rat-race at the brink of their extinction.”

[Another post on the topic is here.]