This is part two of a subject I talked about a few weeks ago: the coming of artificial intelligence. The more I ponder — correction, the more I worry about it — I see AI as the intellectual issue of our time, for writers and especially for educators.
I became more certain of this after my nine-year-old grandson sent me an essay he had done about his kayak trip to the San Juan River a couple months ago with his grandfather; the other grandfather. Don't worry, I'm not going to read the entirety of a nine-year-old's essay, but I have a point to make.
The essay has a few mistakes. It drifts off subject a couple times. The events are not presented in entirely logical order. In short, it sounds like an essay written by a smart nine-year-old. But here's what else it has: life. He begins by saying, "The water flies into my face." He then cuts to an earlier moment, which is a neat trick in writing. He later has a sentence that reads, "I expected that the main attraction of the trip would be a little more...I don't know, main attraction-like." I'm sure his grandfather, who spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours planning the trip, didn't exactly appreciate it, but it was deadly honest. At another point, he describes his grandfather getting caught on a rock, and as he ponders how to get off of it, Asa hears him whispering to himself, "Okay, you got this." Asked about it later, Asa said, "Well, I think I heard him say it, anyway." Nine years old and he already understands artistic license.
So, I then plugged the following into the AI website ChatGPT: "Write me an essay about whitewater kayaking from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy," and within seconds, out spins a piece of writing line by line. To me, it unfolded like a horror film.
The essay by the "nine-year-old writer" infuriates me from the beginning. The first sentence reads, "Last summer, I went on the most awesome adventure of my life!" And of course it ends with an exclamation point. Note to any listeners out there who want to be writers: lose the exclamation point. Never use it unless it's clear you're making fun of something. But the machine thinks, "Oh, it's a nine-year-old. Of course he's going to use an exclamation point and the word awesome."
By the way, there were five other exclamation points in the AI story, which unfolds predictably and robotically. Words are spelled perfectly, paragraphs adhere to logic, mom and dad are comfortably ensconced in the kayak. No jokes about mom and dad, no wry observations, merely a robotic nine-year-old son on a robotic adventure. By the end of the essay, I sincerely hoped the kid would have fallen into the river and taken mom and dad with him.
But my point is that almost any kid in the United States, and almost any kid's parents in the United States, would have looked at the essay and said, "Okay, this is pretty good." It was vanilla and mistake-free and mechanically sound and didn't offend anyone and took zero time to construct. And the real problem would've come if the real teacher accepts that essay and concludes, "Well, it's not very interesting, but it's mechanically sound, there are no mistakes, and, well, young Jake used exclamation points so well. Grade A."
I don't mean to connect the act of writing and editing with life, but let me connect the act of writing and editing with life. Both are about correcting mistakes. Both are about the rewrite, not the write; the revision, not the original. The working and the slaving and the tinkering and the sweating to get it right. Guard against this AI invasion with your life, everyone, and I say that with an exclamation point.
