June 5, 2023

Poetic brevity in the time of bullshit generators

A mild polemic on writing.

I wrote the following to clarify my own thoughts about the relationship between generative AI and writing. It is perhaps more of a reminder to myself than an injunction directed at any particular audience, but I’m sharing it here because it might be useful to others interested in a world where human writing still matters.

i

The most pernicious justification for technological wrecking-balls like ChatGPT is that they are inevitable. The storm blowing in from Paradise cannot be stopped, their defenders say; the wreckage of progress will accumulate unabated. But inevitability is not an argument for why humans need on-demand content factories. It’s instead a strategy for foreclosing resistance, a command that echos forward from the bloody lips of nineteenth century industrialists: Sit and be silent, Luddite.

ii

From a writer’s standpoint, there can be no serious defense of a toy that tries its best to please you by generating piles of reasonably unoffensive platitudes or offering you instructions for mac & cheese in the style of Nietzsche. If you genuinely wish to write — a wish distinct from the desire to be perceived as a writer — there is no justification for substituting a machine’s output for your own. For writers, generative artificial intelligence is either frivolity or fraud.

iii

It is tempting to see ChatGPT as an enchanted object, something imbued with magic, an artifact blessed with an animate spirit. The illusion of a genuine ghost in the machine is seductive, facilitated by design choices that mimic the experience of dialogue and by the program’s default adoption of a synthetic “I” persona. Even more enchanting are the walls of text that appear ex nihilo. Coherent words stream from nowhere in particular, appearing more quickly than any human can type. It makes writing looks effortless.

iv

For writers who prize efficiency — people for whom the act of writing is an inconvenience and an obstacle — this conjuring trick is captivating. “I’ve spent many painful minutes of my life scouring my mind for the right word,” writes a New York Times opinion columnist. “ChatGPT is making that problem a thing of the past.” For others more invested in writing as a meaningful practice, this scouring is the point, or at least a large part of the point. There is something to be learned by enduring intellectual pain. It matters that we care enough to move beyond cliched idioms like “a thing of the past.”

v

The mass adoption of ChatGPT and its progeny as scriptorial authorities is not inevitable and can, should, and is being resisted. The Hollywood writers’ strike offers one model: Organize, agitate, and withhold your labor. Force the people who would happily replace you with AI-generated bullshit to admit your writing is indispensable to their profits and carve that admission into a union contract. But are there other methods? Can writing itself be a tool of resistance? Can humans, whose intellectual labor is threatened by stochastic parrot colonizers, effectively write back against the machine?

vi

It seems a small thing, inconsequential even, but large language models make rotten poets. A poem produced by their predictive wisdom is likely to be cliche-laden slop, a string of sodden, syrupy images mushed together into repetitive, four-line stanzas and decorated with simplistic rhymes. Prod, prompt, bully — whatever you do, it’s hard to get beyond this. The poems may sometimes be indistinguishable from human output but only because humans write so much terrible poetry. What machines like ChatGPT cannot grasp — despite their dazzling aura of enchantment — is what Mary Oliver labels the “mystical document,” or the part of every poem that is more than the sum of decisions about meter, rhyme, sound, and image.1

vii

Writers need not all become poets, nor do they need to embrace mysticism or believe in a soul. But in a moment when words are cheap and flow in meaningless torrents, there is value, I believe, in poetic brevity. Poems contain within themselves, Oliver says, “an essential difference from ordinary language”:

Call it formality, compression, originality, imagination—whatever it is, it is essential . . . [T]he space between daily language and literature is neither terribly deep nor wide, but it does contain a vital difference—of intent and intensity.2

This intent and intensity is what every writer should reach for. We should choose words with care. We should allow ourselves to struggle and find the hair-thin difference between the right word and the almost-right word. We should scour our language — scrape and rub until the old forms fall away, revealing something sharp and red and terrible that has never quite been said before.