Conversation

Notices

1. emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Mar-2023 15:34:16 JST emilygorcenski

   I’m not super concerned about ChatGPT replacing writing as craft, not currently, and probably not in the future. It’s great at replacing the sort of bland, empty writing we have to do from time to time, and I think that the flood of low-quality, bland content will put a premium on actually good writing.

   • emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Mar-2023 15:34:10 JST emilygorcenski

     in reply to

     I just read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and it’s fantastic how he uses language in that book, in ways that a computer will never be able to do.

     ChatGPT won’t replace the craft of writing. It will replace bullshit writing, the kind of writing we have do to but don’t find any joy in. It replaces writing the letter to the judge asking to be excused from jury duty because of a doctor’s appointment. It replaces formulaic text that offers no pleasure.

   • emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Mar-2023 15:34:12 JST emilygorcenski

     in reply to

     Have you ever seen this image?

     ChatGPT feels like the first, even when you are prompt engineering to get it not to be.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Mar-2023 15:34:13 JST emilygorcenski

     in reply to

     But it’s so featureless. Read good writing. It has breaks and unreliable narrators or starts in media res or deceives the reader, it foreshadows and uses metaphor and symbolism, and it can do all of those things even in nonfiction writing.

   • emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Mar-2023 15:34:14 JST emilygorcenski

     in reply to

     There’s this thing that people do in writing and presentations that drives me bonkers, and that’s when they follow a formulaic approach with no context whatsoever. Like in school you learn the five paragraph essay format and the first one is an introduction and the last is a conclusion and then somehow it sticks that that’s how good writing works.

   • emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Mar-2023 15:34:15 JST emilygorcenski

     in reply to

     English is a much harder language to write in than most native English speakers realize. The more I work in another language and the more I review things written by non-native English speakers the more I realize this. ChatGPT produces text that is grammatically correct and even decently structured, but it is not *good* writing.