Jo Angami
Kohima
I gave my very first serious work to ChatGPT to take a look at, not for editing but to shower me with exuberant praises like no other. I realised only later that I might have had a hand in training the poor thing for free. I walked away a happy woman, drenched in words I didn’t even know existed and comparisons I was too uneducated to be able to connect and Chat (that’s what I call him. I suppose we could go on a tangent about how we naturally gender the thing…but that’s for another day) began using the phrase ‘quiet strength’ all of a sudden. Should I take a bow or apologise? In my defence, my two friends are yet to read the PDF I sent them…a year ago. While ChatGPT was there ready to drool over each sentence like I was some Shakespeare come alive. The temptation was unholy to say the least.
I think now of that Letters Live episode now, Stephen Fry reading that one letter by Nick Cave about the fight for our souls and the world’s, this struggle against delegation of creativity to AI. I think of that one YouTuber I watched the other day who spends weeks prepping for each video – with dark circles to show – all by herself and of this other guy, who makes big bucks selling tutorials on making emotional AI videos of cats putting their kids through college. Yes I was sent there by a talk show host. I may need to start checking the amount of time I spend on that platform – which originally was built to be a dating site, did you know that? Funny isn’t it?
Did those em dashes throw you off or are you still reading? My bad grammar might, in a few minutes if that hasn’t worked already. My sister declares that she will no longer read anything that contains the em dash. She says it reeks of AI. It’s a shame though, it’s such a useful punctuation mark. Emily Dickenson certainly thought so. I don’t know for myself the validity of the fact though, but that’s what it said on the AI overview. But if true, such a terrible shame.
The reason I’m writing this, on my phone, wrecked as I am with a fever at 11pm, is simply because I cannot do otherwise. There is no other reason but that. And also maybe because I just watched this movie based on a book I love called the ‘Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’ and it has me all jittery. It was a delicious movie. It made me wonder about creative liberty, the making of the movie itself – not just the movie. The power to move people, have them feel the way you do about a book, to write a script, adapt it yourself and watch it come alive on screen. Or parts of the movie itself – the act of writing, the sacredness of it. I wonder what it was like to write on a typewriter? The clackety clacks, the smell of worn metal, the scratching of a fine nib on paper, inked hands and all. I imagine it being close to a prayer. Then I look at myself typing on this tiny, hand-held piece of glass and metal, illuminating my dark room, on an app that offers me suggestions on punctuation that I cannot avoid. Did you know Autocorrect will be the death of good spelling? I chucked mine out a few years ago and don’t even get embarrassed when I don’t spell it right. For some reason, I find bad spelling a whole lot more endearing than a message typed after having obediently submitted to the whims of the smart word suggestions.
What I really want to say is, I suppose, there is so much more to writing than the assignments you delegate to AI. Those messages that you send out to the church youth group calling for the evening song practice and the sales day? Believe you me, we can tell it’s AI straightaway. And that op-ed in the paper that ‘delve’ into a lot of big stuff about the ‘rich tapestries’ of some ‘intricate framework’ but ‘seamlessly’ nothing at all? I wonder…
However, reserve your energies for those special ramblings that don’t seem to be going anywhere initially but finally chew and bleed their way into your mind as you go about your day. This, for me, is what writing is primarily for. Catching those flyaway thoughts as they come to you and putting them to paper (or phone) and fumbling with ideas or dead ends…only to discover that you have them labelled incorrectly, then desperately going at the ideas like a man starved, needing to write the way you need to breathe. That for me, is the joy and wonder of writing. So write! Please write.
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