Me vs GPT: Artificial Intelligence Versus Authentic Stupidity

Let me start by saying I have a great relationship with our future overlords.

I think AI is the coolest thing invented in my lifetime, that and automatic espresso makers.

For example, I work at a preschool and they require pages of flowery language that say little to nothing.

ChatGPT is perfect for that.

I’ve leaned heavily on it to build my website as well. It serves to provide information to prospective merchant mariners.

One of the main reasons I joined Medium is I wanted to write. I pigeonholed myself into a narrow niche with my website and made hundreds of pages using AI.

This left me with a bunch to say and nowhere to say it.

One day while churning out content for my site ChatGPT asked me “what style of writing would you like this article to be in?” I thought,

“Silly GPT, you are my writing style”

This left me unfulfilled. My fingers itched, and here I am.

GPT’s and Me

Recently ChatGPT created an update that allows you to go into the configurations and create your own GPT’s. These are essentially plugins for the model to finetune to specific tasks.

I love this feature.

I created a GPT for each one of my work tasks and it never loses its context and provides the proper response for each prompt. I am enamored with this feature and look forward to what it becomes for myself and everyone else.

Medium in a bottle

I copied the text of some of the best writers on Medium and their articles about writing. I fed it into the back end of GPT and created a Medium editor GPT. It is trained to analyze my stories, compare it to its training data and give me editorial criticism and feedback.

I use ChatGPT as my grammar, punctuation and spelling checker with the prompt:

Please correct grammar, punctuation and spelling. Do not rewrite my work

Occasionally I ask it to brainstorm suggestions for subtopics but this is rare. Most of the time I use the most advanced software on earth as a glorified spell checker.

Can you blame me? Medium’s spell checker is atrocious and Apple’s has lost its mind with the most recent update.

The Cage Match

Yesterday I followed this workflow and entered my story,

into my Editor GPT. It gave me the same feedback it usually does. A list of positives followed by a list of suggestions. Sometimes I will ask it to show me an example of a revised article with the suggestions it made.

Yesterday I made sure to prompt it to keep the article and tone as close to the original as possible. My first impression was,

I can run with this.

So I put it into Medium and started formatting.

On second glance

I like to write on my computer, format on my computer and then proofread on my phone a few hours later. This helps me catch mistakes.

It helps me recognize mismatches in flow and wording and catch errors that my mind overlooks when the writing process is still fresh.

While laying on the floor in the cot closet at work before my mid day nap, I reviewed the story.

It wasn’t me.

It lost its edge, my voice had been compressed and distilled into a milk toast version of myself. It was grammatically correct and technically perfect, but lacked the je ne sais quoi that tells you I am human.

I frantically jumped up from my napping sanctuary and lurched to my laptop and immediately reverted to my original article and started the proofing process over.

Artificial Intelligence is still Artificial

I think 2024 will be a great year for human writers. The main reason is ChatGPT has commoditized words. Anyone with a GPT account can churn out pages and pages of content and the world will begin to distinguish it from human writing.

People argue that it can be prompted to create better quality work and I am sure it can, but at the end of the day, it cannot be prompted to write like an idiot.

That’s my bread and butter.

Copy That

Copy, It’s what marketers call their words. Marketing copy has slowly reduced to a style of writing that strips everyone of their authenticity and serves the sole purpose to sell you something.

The harbinger of marketing copy is AI.

ChatGPT can do this with its digital eyes closed and still program apps, and write my lesson plans for school without breaking a sweat.

What it can’t do is create the first person narrative of a human that wakes up as a bug and slowly loses his humanity over the course of the book while you, the reader, feel your own humanity fleeting empathically.

ChatGPT cannot recreate Kafka.

Imperfections

Throughout human history the most successful conquerors wielded diseases rather than swords. It wasn’t technological prowess that conquered rather adaptation to pestilence.

It’s our dirty-ness that makes us human.

As human writers we need to embrace imperfections and recognize this as our unique signature telling readers there’s a heartbeat connected to the keys.

Goodbye grammar Nazi's

You lost, your time of smugly pointing out minor errors in content has come and gone. Your grammatical superiority has been distilled into a LLM and is available to almost everyone on earth.

Let me caveat this by saying grammar is still important. There are technical aspects of writing that will enhance your words, but in the age of AI imperfections forge trust.

Me Vs GPT

Luckily the world never saw the version of my story repackaged and cheapened by GPT.

Likewise, I will not run this article through GPT just in case ChatGPT becomes our benevolent overlord. I don’t want it to hold a grudge over me for insulting its ability to emulate Kafka.

I don’t want to get tea bagged by Roko’s ballsack.

I don’t need it to send me to some automated torture factory and turn me into milk toast because I called its writing that.

Rest easy writers

If I can leave you with anything, it’s that I wholeheartedly believe human writing will stick out like a sore thumb in the future.

As the internet continues to be inundated with AI content, more and more, people will search human perspectives. The trust we build as authentic human writers is forged through our imperfections.

My authenticity is found in my stupidity.

I can’t write.

I talk to myself and luckily I type fast enough to dictate what I am saying.

Learn about AI

If you would like to learn more about AI and its potential check out Andrew Lucas’s page and follow him. He writes awesome content about AI’s potential.

More on the war of words

If you would like to continue your exploration of the subject of human writing than look no further than Victoria Kjos’s recent story,