In the interval between publishing the previous issue and the current one, a little something called ChatGPT has come into being. It bids fair to put me out of a job—for which I may eventually be grateful. At the moment, I feel a certain amount of dread. I can feel my old Luddism acting up.
There have been Artificial Intelligence programs for years now, generating boilerplate internet prose that some already take to be authoritative. The tone is stilted, but there are mega-reams of AI-generated goo out there. I imagine much of the malware-laden clickbait that lurks on Facebook and other platforms is of that ilk. “Fifty Things You Need to Throw Out Right Away,” etc.
Much of that drivel is too poorly written and too repetitive to be entirely the work of sentient human writers. Until I had the epiphany that it was computer-generated, I found it somewhat infuriating. Now I am only upset that so many take it seriously—and that I, too, have clicked and bit and had my hard disk load up with cookies thereby.
ChatGPT is a whole different virtual animal. It can generate digital blather almost imaginatively—if a machine can be said to possess an imagination. It spews prose that lulls with its perfect reasonableness. It can rumble on in disarmingly boring academic tones. It is engaging and sometimes quite intentionally funny. If you give it a set of characters and perimeters, it will
