A Very Unsatisfying Experience
I have never really considered myself to be the most eloquent writer. In fact, often I read back through my blog entries and wonder if people are judging my intelligence based on my limited vernacular and inability to articulate things in a way that conveys the full meaning of what I am attempting to express.
I have really been trying to improve on my writing by going back and looking over my text, sort of a refactoring of my ideas to see if I can make them more coherent.
I Made a Mistake
I did something that upon a bit of reflection was not as helpful as I thought it would be. A few weeks ago, I fully wrote several blog entries completely on my own. Then, paragraph by paragraph I fed them into ChatGPT with a prompt asking it to correct my writing for spelling and grammar, while retaining the original meaning.
At first, I was quite happy with the results. It made my output seem more cohesive and well formed. However, after a few days of this, I started to notice AI generated content around the web that was styled and in the same voice as my AI corrected posts. My content had completely lost its personality.
In a way, my eyes were opened to something very sad that is happening everywhere right now. A sort of averaging of human expression.
Homogenized Creativity
I hadn't really noticed it before, but once you spot GPT's way of writing and you begin to see it everywhere it can start to give you an eerie Orwellian vibe. It brings to mind that feeling I got when I first saw some images that were generated by averaging thousands of human faces of a particular ethnicity to create a generic person from a particular country.
What you end up with is a sterile, flawless face. It is pleasant to look at, but there is a quality to it that makes it the same as all of the other averaged out faces. It is missing some kind of Wabi Sabi.
I also began to notice that there were people commenting on my posts that were clearly feeding my entire blog entry into ChatGPT asking it to "Write a comment based on the blog entry"
I immediately started to get a grossed out feeling and decided to never again use ChatGPT in this way. I can certainly see a place for this technology. I think it can be really helpful, as an example, for people who have a hard time communicating their points in English. However, I think it needs to be finely tuned as to not give that weird generic person vibe.
I just wanted to write this post as sort of an apology to anyone who has followed me for a while and noticed that something was off. I haven't used this technology for a couple of weeks now, and only utilized it for a few posts. On the upside, it did help me a bit to understand where I was making grammatical errors that were causing my content to be difficult to follow at times.
Where is this Going?
I have a feeling that people are going to be rebelling against this sort of cookie cutter approach to content creation. Once you see it, you can't help but spot it everywhere. It really creates the same uncomfortable feeling that you get when you see the same Midjourney motifs over and over again to the point of nausea.
It's hard to believe that this new world of generative AI has only been around for a matter of months. My hope is that things will find a kind of balance between being used as a creative enhancement and outright laziness. Only time will tell!
I would really appreciate your support!
