Why you should never use ChatGPT for writing

 

Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-using-laptop-wit-chat-gpt-16094040/

For all the noise about how wonderful ChatGPT is for relegating all your writing to it and the fact that businesses, individuals, researchers, students et al are doing just that, it is the dumbest thing one can resort to. For all that ChatGPT and other similar Generative AI tools do is to regurgitate past content and present it as new. The obvious danger in this is that these will soon enough start regurgitating, the mountainous amounts of AI-created content in cyberspace.

The best parallel that one can draw is with a primitive civilization that has been gifted with a machine that is able to bake cakes if fed with the right kind of ingredients, making the natives forget how to bake cakes themselves. Once the machine breaks down, they are unable to make cake anymore, as they have forgotten how to. For all those singing hosannas to ChatGPT, just wait a few years and the AI-created drivel will drive everybody nuts.

Generating content using AI crimps a person’s ability to think critically and, therefore, learn. Imagine, how harmful it is for students who more than anyone else need to be able to think critically so as to be able to understand concepts better. All that ChatGPT will teach them is to become prompting experts. That is a very limited use of the human brain’s muscles. Just because we possess automobile technology, have we forbidden our children from learning to walk?

No matter how good one might be at prompting Generative AI tools to create content for us, one is never totally confident of the accuracy of the output. This can wreak havoc when one is engaged in carrying out high-end academic research.  The very term Generative AI is a misnomer because intelligence denotes the presence of a brain, which is substituted by an aggregator and narrator of information gleaned from here and there.

Writing recalls, relates and shapes the lived human experience. It cannot be left to machines. They can only replicate and simulate what human thought might be. If tomorrow there is sentient AI, perhaps it will be able to write about its ‘lived’ experience, which will be uniquely its own! We won’t be able to do that very effectively for it, as we are not AI, but physical beings with a carbon-based body.

Creditable publications and increasingly many businesses deploying content marketing tactics are making it clear that ChatGPT-generated content is not kosher. It is liable to invite the wrath of the readers who take it to be human-created content and find out it is a machine without feelings or emotions that is fooling them with contrived content that is often plain wrong and ill-informed. Writing and the feelings it evokes are very personal things and just as it is inconceivable that one can marry a machine or a virtual being, it is ludicrous that ChatGPT should attempt to create literature.