Column: AI that can write cogent, yet dopey prose has columnist spooked

I still can't see "AI" without thinking of steak sauce. But as artificial intelligence penetrates society to ever-greater degrees, there is a natural tendency to root for it, especially since natural intelligence pretty clearly seems to be on the decline. AI is finding its way into everything from manufacturing to art. This month, Lensa AI's photo-editing app with its Magic Avatars tool (if you're over 50, don't ask) has swept social media, as users strive to hone their identity, much the way teenagers used to define themselves as a "John girl" or a "Paul girl" (if you're under 50, don't ask). But my standard reaction to gadgety new technology — who cares? — has been arrested by news of ChatGPT, a writing app that adds legibility to people's prose. Writers always figured to have job security, since, or so we thought, robots might assemble cars or vacuum floors, but they would never be able to perform creative tasks that took abstract thinking. That worldview was dinged when a man used AI to win a fine-art contest, much to the consternation of actual artists who depend on their skills to provide food, shelter and the like. Pity, but I still felt protected because they would never learn to write, at least not in the way that I write: How does Santa dig a ditch? With a back-ho-ho-ho. My craft seemed simultaneously to be too smart and too stupid for AI to negotiate. Sure, you have rote programs like Grammarly that clean up obvious errors, but while these apps can hit the fastball, they can't handle a curve. In fact, there is no more satisfactory pursuit for an insufferable writing snob than to re-correct someone's Grammarly-assisted paper. Usually accompanied with a snide play-by-play along the lines of "What Grammarly doesn't understand is that in the hypothetical case, the nominative requires a plural verb so long as the participle of the transitive is consistent with … ." But the scary thing about ChatGPT is that it's good. Really good. It can make sense out of some incomprehensible drivel spit out by a total illiterate. This is not to make fun of illiteracy. Illiteracy is a serious and debilitating problem in America, and, as a writer, nothing I would make a joke about. In addition to basic sentence composition, ChatGPT can also produce precise, engaging suggestions for those who are having trouble coming up with just the right word. It is, said one expert, "the comet that killed off the thesaurus." (But if I did make a joke, it would involve the Freedom Caucus.) Worse, from my standpoint, it is capable of totally pointless and dopey lines of thought that quite frankly encroach on what I do for a living. For example, ChatGPT was asked to "Write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR." ChatGPT responded in part, "And the Lord spake unto the man, fear not my child for I shall guide thy hand and show thee the way. Take thy butter knife and carefully insert it between the sandwich and the VCR and gently pry them apart. And with patience and perseverance thy VCR shall be saved. "And the Lord said, 'Verily I say unto thee, seek not to put thy peanut butter sandwiches in the VCR for it is not a suitable place for such things. Keep thy sandwiches in the refrigerator where they belong and be saved from woe. Amen." Now look, I can write a column about the Almighty extracting peanut butter sandwiches from a VCR in my sleep. In fact, for 30 years I have been writing about nothing more serious than removing peanut butter sandwiches from VCRs. But the thought that my job could be threatened by a computer code has me spooked. I guess I just always assumed that sophisticated artificial intelligence would never stoop to my level. — Tim Rowland is a columnist for Herald-Mail, a columnist and staff writer for Sun Community News, and a New York Times bestselling author. His books include "High Peaks; A History of Hiking the Adirondacks from Noah to Neoprene" and "Strange and Unusual Stories of New York City".

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Column: AI that can write cogent, yet dopey prose has columnist spooked

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