The heart of the matter
Why our A.I. overlords won't be stealing our book deals quite yet
I’m already tired of hearing about the robots. Sure, new technology is fascinating, and usually I air on the side of early adopter (lots of deaf people do—hello TTY-as-very-early-text messaging!) But there’s something about things like ChatGPT I find unsettling, or maybe it’s the discourse around the technology I have a bigger problem with. I’ve spent a lot of time lately wondering what it says about our society that we invent robots to make art*, (*art-adjacent products? collages?) rather than, say, to aggregate knowledge for curing for rare diseases, or subverting impending climate disasters.
I don’t know why tech guys are so often hell-bent on generating “solutions” for problems in the arts and humanities that don’t actually exist. The Deaf community, for example, has had to suffer through multiple rounds of saviorism by versions of the “sign language glove.” The gloves, designed to be worn by a signing person, can only read the manual alphabet or rudimentary signs, never a real sentence that someone might actually say. They are always designed by hearing dudes with little to no interaction with, or input from, actual deaf people. Yet time and again we are expected to praise these inventors for deigning to give us their time and genius. No one has ever explained, if these things were actually implemented, what would happen if a hearing person talked back? It is as if the inventors’ imaginations couldn’t see a world in which they might have anything to say to us, let alone hold a conversation. If they had had a conversation with us, they would know we really, really hate sign language gloves.
ChatGPT is a bit like this, at least in the solving-a-nonexistent-problem way. Maybe these inventors focus so doggedly on language because they view it as a challenge; maybe it’s jealousy, or even a protective measure against their own livelihoods. Most likely, though, I think it stems from a misunderstanding of the very function of language itself, especially in its creative forms. Like sign language gloves, a lot of these issues could be remedied by guys in tech studying the humanities, or engaging with writers. Of course, then they’d find out that writers don’t actually want writing robots either.
When we think of writing as a capitalist labor problem to be solved, a commodity and a finished product, it makes sad sense that technology could produce a facsimile that consumers, with no other options but still experiencing the human need for entertainment, would purchase. This is what the big execs are counting on in their fight against the Writers’ Guild, anyway. But of course, that’s not all writing is or does. Writing also bears witness, teaches, protests, cultivates empathy, and joy; it invents and imagines. In these days of culture wars and book bans, we’re often fighting over art, but art is also what we’re fighting for.
Right now, tools like ChatGPT are nothing more than very talented plagiarists. This is true when assigned creative tasks like screenwriting, where the machine pulls from existing scripts to create a mashup of stuff with similar tones, but also when faced with more specialized questions. Scholars across fields have found that when asked to cite sources, ChatGPT lies, fabricating a citation that looks like a bibliography entry, but is ultimately devoid of material and links to nowhere. With respect to ethics and the future of education, BIG YIKES. But I digress.
Obviously, A.I. learns fast; that’s kind of its thing. The content it generates will improve. It may take over certain kinds of marketing or basic communication-centric writing duties, or be used as a tool by lots of writers, like we think of thesauruses or spell check today. But even as ChatGPT gets better at the verisimilitude of humanity, ultimately I believe the emotional resonance of its creative work will fall short without lived experience that serves as the reason to write in the first place.
A colleague once told me that most of the time writing isn’t difficult because of the anxiety of audience, or the ways in which the end product ends up being packaged, but rather because, through most of the writing process, nobody cares at all. For me this certainly rings true. It took me seven years to write True Biz. I wasn’t under contract. I was working multiple other jobs. If I didn’t show up to those jobs, I would have gotten in trouble, been fired, not been able to pay my rent, etc. If I never finished that novel, very few people would have asked after it, and there would have been no external consequences. But I wrote the book anyway, because it was in and of me, and I needed it to exist in the world. Because I feel physically and emotionally worse when I don’t write. I’m willing to bet that the driving force behind a lot of the books we cherish is an artist’s deep love for what they do.
If the function of language is to connect two (or more) people, then what is the point connecting people to machine? I for one do not want to read the novel version of “devoid of material and links to nowhere,” and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
I know the Money Men see this difference. Those with their eye on the bottom line use the knowledge that we love what we do to justify paying us less, which, of course is bullshit. But in that process, they’re telling on themselves—writers’ love for our work is palpable. It’s what makes it feel essential, which is also what makes it good.
And you know what? The robots know this, too. While I was drafting this, I received a newsletter from my friend and comrade-in-Blunderbuss (RIP), Travis, also about ChatGPT. As an experiment, he had instructed the machine to create screenplay scenes in various styles, one of them a Nora Ephronesque rom-com set in a world where screenwriters had been replaced by machines. The result was a middling dialogue between screenwriter hopeful, Ruby, and romantic-interest, James, about Ruby’s Hollywood rejections as her work is continually turned down in favor of A.I.-generated scripts:
JAMES
Just because it's easier to let a machine do the work, doesn't mean it's better. Don't forget, you have something they don't.
Ruby raises an eyebrow.
RUBY
Oh? And what's that?
JAMES
Heart.
She laughs, the first genuine laugh she's had all day. James grins back at her, and for a moment, they forget about the world around them.
Keep the faith, friends. Robots don’t have that, either.
A few orders of business:
I’ll be talking True Biz in a few places in the coming months. All events will include ASL/ English interpretation and virtual events will have closed captioning.
6.13 San Francisco Public Library 6PM PT/ 9PM ET (virtual), Register here
6.28 Maryland Deaf Culture Digital Library 8PM ET (virtual), Register here
9.18 Converse University South Carolina (in-person) schedule TBA
Also, if you’re in the market for another alternative to the ailing bird app, find me on Bluesky. Will it stick? *infinity shrugs*