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As I may have mentioned, I’m filling in as the Free Press’s Perspectives editor, and while it is a challenging, engaging job, between cabinet shuffles and budget announcements, it doesn’t leave much time to ponder whimsical arts-related topics for a newsletter.
My colleague Jay Bell, who pens the Behind the Bench sports newsletter (subscribe here), recently suggested he might have the artificial-intelligence tool ChatGPT write it for him. This week, I considered doing the same — partly as a joke, partly as a time-saver — until I read the sonnet our associate editor for digital news, Wendy Sawatzy, commissioned from the OpenAI chatbot, based on my previous newsletter about being unable to score Springsteen tickets. Behold!
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When Jill Wilson heard the news of the Boss
That Bruce Springsteen would come to town in fall,
She felt her heart beat fast, her pulse embossed
With excitement, she wanted tickets all
She waited for the day, the tickets on sale
And when the time had come, she rushed to buy
But alas, the website did her assail
No tickets left, she felt she’d surely die
Oh cruel fate, to keep her from the show
To miss the chance to see the legend’s face
Her heart felt heavy, burdened with woe,
Her hopes and dreams now vanished without trace
But let not this defeat dampen her heart,
For Bruce’s music still lives on, a work of art
Setting aside the fact that the bot has grossly overestimated my degree of devastation, it is clear the world’s poets need not pack up their quills just yet. While the phrase “her pulse embossed with excitement” is oddly lovely, ChatGPT’s seeming ignorance of iambic pentameter or scansion, its not-quite-right word choices and its reliance on cliché reduce this to doggerel.
Writing in The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany points out we only have ourselves to blame for ChatGPT’s inability to craft a truly creative sentence. After all, it’s taking its cues from reams and reams of boring, bad writing, essays fluffed up with “It goes without saying,” endless news stories where cooler heads prevailed, greeting-card sentiments where roses are always red and moon rhymes with June.
“ChatGPT can write you anything, but it can’t write you anything good,” Tiffany says. “If you ask ChatGPT to write something that has any kind of tired and played-out associations, they’ll all appear.”
ChatGPT-generated work is filling the internet. (Richard Drew / Associated Press files)
And as more ChatGPT-generated works fill the internet, we’re headed to what Tiffany calls a “super-clichéd future — new chatbots learning about human language from clichéd writing that had been written by old chatbots based on clichéd writing written by people, the clichés multiplying with each round” — a phenomenon Melanie Mitchell, an expert in language models, calls “regression to the meh.”
I can’t promise cliche-free writing — we all have our linguistic crutches — but I can promise this newsletter will never you assail.
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