The hosts of the podcast Rational Security were debating in this last episode, among their chosen topics for the week, the question of just how scared we should be of the new (but already old-seeming) AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Some were of the opinion that it would unleash turmoil throughout the world of professional writing. One of the co-hosts cited a recent article in the Atlantic which argued that the future of writing would never be the same. Even among professionals, this article's take went, it would soon become standard to create first drafts of an article using an AI. The human writer's role would therefore be confined more to editing and refining than to generating the base text.
Quinta Jurecic spoke for us all, however, when she expressed skepticism. In a voice that I hope will not seem naively John Henry– or Ned Ludd–esque ten to twenty years from now, she declared that she can't see ChatGPT replacing human content creators anytime soon. She pointed out that, even if she wanted to write her articles using the machine, she "couldn't even see how that would work."
I have to agree with her. Even supposing I wanted to deprive myself of a key source of meaning and interest in my life by generating my future blog posts using AI, instead of typing them out from my own brain, I don't even know how I would do so. Certainly, I could type in a prompt to the algorithm: "Write a blog about you." But whatever resulted wouldn't be what I want to say! It would not be the blog you are reading now; it would be something else. Why would I want to generate such a thing?
And this is not even to mention the other flaws people have observed in the program's output: its bland prose, its lack of sophistication, its tendency to intermingle fact and fiction without discerning the difference (it is, after all, fundamentally just an algorithm that guesses the statistically most-likely next word in a sentence, one after another). The day when it will replace all Atlantic writers, then, seems far off.
That said, we don't know how much more sophisticated the technology will get, or how quickly; and the mere rumor of an impending automation apocalypse for the authorial profession is enough to trigger some very raw emotions. After all, people who try to make a living by their pen have already been through the wringer the last few decades. Must another catastrophe visit them so soon?
I'm old enough to remember, after all, when a craving to write could be channeled into some relatively plausible career paths. A kid with an affinity for the humanities over the sciences might, as late as the mid-2000s when I was in high school, contemplate getting a journalism degree in college, and this would have been seen as a reasonable investment in one's future that might yield a paying and reasonably secure job.
To be sure, some people still make their living as journalists. Just as some people make their living as rock stars. But as a middle class profession with a relatively defined trajectory, it scarcely exists anymore: certainly not at the level of local, written news. The internet hollowed it out. Those of us who still managed to earn a paycheck by our words, even after the great transformation, largely did so by serving in "communications" roles in organizations—as I did in my last job—where we were paid to crank out press releases to be picked up by hypothetical small-scale news outlets that no longer existed.
Given that this mass culling of a once-great profession is just barely in the rear-view mirror, is it any surprise that the handful of paid journalists at the handful of legacy outlets that managed to survive, à la the Atlantic, would be ready to assume the worst about ChatGPT? And who knows—maybe we have cause to worry. Perhaps it will sweep through as a punishing fire and thin the ranks of writers even further.
We saw with the internet, after all, that the pinnacle of the profession could manage to survive the flood. A handful of name brands managed to keep their mastheads just above water. But the relatively weak perished. The local papers; the small zines; the niche outlets. Où sont they now? Could not the same thing happen again?
To be sure, the most sophisticated kinds of journalism will still need to be written by humans, for the reasons Jurecic laid out. But what is to become of us press release–writers? The generators of rapid response statements? Ten years from now, will I have to explain to my nephew the astonishing fact that, when I was starting out in my career, they still paid humans to write these things word by word, and he will scarcely believe it?
One can intercede at this point and say all the things I've said in the past—that automation ultimately creates more jobs than it eliminates; that the replacement of some rote writing tasks by a machine might only create new opportunities for higher-order cognition. But—also as I've pointed out before—what suffering and devastation can nonetheless be inflicted in the time of transition before the new equilibrium is established!
It's hard in all of this not to feel somehow singled out. Has it not been universally acknowledged already that writers and artists have a hard time paying the bills? That their callings are ones of passion; that they can't be in it for the money, because it is no easy task for them to make a living? In short, haven't they (we) already suffered enough? Why must a new culling, a second mass extinction event for the profession, be visited upon our heads—and so soon after the first, when we were just starting to recover?
Perhaps we just have to accept that so it always has been for writers, and so it always shall be. An ode by Basil Bunting in his collected works portrays the poet begging a penny in "arles" (a servant's wages) of Apollo, god of songs. "Well sung singer," replies the god, "but in this trade we pay no wages." Such, the implication seems to be, is simply our cross to bear. It is the penalty the muse exacts of those who would seek her patronage.
Bunting's own solution to this immemorial problem was simply to spend much of his young married life in poverty, residing in the Canary Islands to save money on living expenses. (Bunting's first wife is reported to have remarked: "The idea of working for a living was so hateful to him that he screamed and raved if it was ever mentioned.") After World War II, he finally submitted to fate and got a series of jobs, which he described as "drudgery" fatal to his muse.
Here's the kicker though, kids: do you know what field Bunting's "drudgery" job was in? Newspapers! That's right. Journalism jobs used to be so abundant that they were regarded by the authorially-inclined as despicable hack work to which one only stooped as a means to put bread on the table.
Being a poet or novelist was one's moonshot; journalism used to be the plan B. Nowadays, of course, Bunting's newspaper job, which he hated so much, would itself be someone's moonshot.
Are we now to be deprived of even more Plan Bs? Must this way of life be made even harder? Must even more barriers be put in front of our efforts to align our passion for the written word with some plausible strategy for earning a living? A philistine character in one of Bunting's less-serious poems offers us some free advice: "You could advertise soap." But how long will it be before that—which we might scoff at as the plan B hackwork of today—will itself look like an unimaginably grand opportunity? Writing soap ads, after all, seems like it would be exactly ChatGPT's speed.
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