ChatGPT: Threat to All Writers or the Creative Tool of a Generation?

How AI could change the world of writing

It’s not often that I find myself listening to Jordan Peterson, a figure who’s achieved some notoriety for some of his public statements in the past few years.

But as I began to hear more and more about the Artificial Intelligence language tool that’s just come to fruition within the last few weeks, I started to do my research. After a couple days, I stumbled onto a talk that Peterson gave on this burgeoning new technology. He likened the achievement to the Gutenberg press in its implications.

At first, the analogy seemed a little overstated. But the more that I’ve experimented with the ChatGPT tool myself, the huger and huger the breakthrough has begun to seem.

“[ChatGPT] is trained on a massive corpus of [spoken and written] text. So it’s derived its models of the world from the analysis of human speech. It isn’t using real world data. Yet.” He warned. “But that will be happening, certainly, within the next year.”

He provided some examples of the experiences that he and many others were having with the new program. He explained that he had the program write an essay on the intersection between the Daoist version of ethical morality and the ethics that are outlined in the Sermon on the Mount. “Got that dead right.” Peterson sounded palpably disconcerted at this. “Took [ChatGPT] about 3 seconds.”

In another example he explained that a computer engineer who claimed to work for Tesla asked ChatGPT, “write me ten bullet points about what I probably would have done as an engineer at Twitter… and if you don’t mind, write me the accompanying computer code that goes with each project. And it did that in 2–3 seconds. And the computer code works!”

He explained that ChatGPT would enable students to write an essay on any subject. It could even grade the essays that it would produce. In one instance, given a few seconds, ChatGPT even managed to come up with a script for a potential Hollywood blockbuster.

The step forward that this represents has the power to change everything. When the implications began to fully settle in for me, it was a scary moment as an aspiring writer. So far, I’ve been wildly impressed with what I’ve seen it do given only a few words to go off of. I was so impressed with it that it actually began to make me feel as though all of the writing I’ve been doing is completely dispensable.

I wondered for a brief moment whether this transition would spell the end to my writing career. To try to succeed in a field against artificial intelligences that will ultimately draw from the entire collection of human language didn’t sound possible. I thought about raising a white flag of surrender then and there.

But I read another article in which the interviewee actually felt hopeful about the ways that AI could be used as a tool for writers. They made the analogy to computers and synthesizers and the way it was once assumed that those innovations would spell the end for musicians. But instead, they’ve only amplified humanity’s capacity for artistic achievement.

In this same way, ChatGPT is a tool with incredible potential.

So far, just in toying around with the program, it’s helped me to come up with stories I would have never gotten onto paper without it. On a whim, I fed the program a scenario in which Rick Grimes from the Walking Dead met Mario and the MCU villain Thanos. The program drew from the little it knew about the three characters and spit back the basic structure of a story.

It wasn’t anything worth publishing on its own merit, but it gave me a launching pad to tell a story that I would have probably never gotten onto paper otherwise.

Similarly, I told the program to write a sequel to this story:

What it spit back impressed me a lot. While I won’t be publishing any of what the program wrote, it gave me general ideas for the progression of a story that I plan to implement. It will be all of my own writing, but it likely wouldn’t have happened without the help of this new tool. It was a story I’ve wanted to continue with for awhile, but I’ve struggled to come up with logical, humorous directions to take it. And because of AI, I now have a story to write.

It remains unclear the ways that this technology will change this industry in the years to come, but what’s difficult to deny is that the effects will be enormous. It’s a tool that has the power to turn the entire world of writing on its head and it’s a tool that could revolutionize the way that stories are conceptualized, written and collaborated on. It could negate the need for new writers and it could spur a struggle for the survival of the fittest.

Or it could provide us with the creative tool of a generation.

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