I overslept today, so I asked GPT-4 to write a limerick about oversleeping:
There once was a fellow who'd doze,
He set his alarm but he chose,
To hit snooze a few times,
And waste precious chimes,
Now his blog is a void and that blows.
I modified the final line, but the rest is all GPT. Here's a haiku:
Dreams lingered too long,
Sunrise passed, clock unaware,
Late for the day's start.
Meh. But I cranked out half a dozen versions in two minutes.
Limericks are harmless and amusing, and there's almost a certain charm in seeing that someone did Mad Libs one better and created a computer program that can compose them on a prompt.
Haiku feel a little different. They're meant to evoke an emotional response. When written by a human, I get the sense of a shared experience between the writer and reader. Not so with a ChatGPT production. Then they are words abstracted and combined to produce a certain reaction, absent any "experience" by its creator. That is a loss, in my view.
Ditto for longer works, fiction, etc. The sense of a shared experience between the creator and reader is an important aspect to the pleasure of literature. Something is lost if there's no human directing the creative side.
That doesn't mean computers and AI can't be used in creation. Certainly lots of technology can be used in the production of art and creative work, and I think you can make a case that many of our greatest artists are the greatest masters of technology.
Meanwhile, chatbots will likely proliferate in other areas, where there's probably more money, for one thing. In my work years, I'd often spent many hours creating various documents, some brief, some hundreds of pages long. What a great value it would have been to have something to shorten the time it took to write them.
I was not a programmer, but this example is a good use case:
Human coder cost (quote): £5k, 2 weeks
Chat-4 cost: $0.11, 3 hours
Content! Now Kevin can stay in bed late every day! And I can ignore his blog. =) I mean, "But I cranked out half a dozen versions in two minutes" sounds like they were all meh, so...
Use ChatGPT to compose a blog entry for you. Let's see if we can figure out if you used it or not.