Emily Articulated: ChatGPT

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

“In an era dominated by screens and characterized by fleeting attention spans, the written word stands as an enduring testament to the depth of human expression. Join me on a journey through the paragraphs of this article, where I unravel the threads of Millennial experiences woven into the rich tapestry of words, exploring the profound impact that writing has on our lives and the world we inhabit.”

This was the answer generated by ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot, responding to my prompt, “Write an introduction to my Millennial-focused column ‘Emily Articulated’ that talks about why writing is important.”

And although the introduction is a bit more self-aggrandizing than I’d be comfortable writing for myself, I don’t think it reads half-bad, and certainly not like a robot. 

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

ChatGPT’s human-like writing capabilities come from how the bot was built, and how it continues to evolve. Based on a large language model, ChatGPT utilizes a deep-learning algorithm to summarize, predict and generate human-sounding language. 

In other words, ChatGPT was “fed” large samples of writing — from websites, articles, books and other language-based, human-written documents — and learned to recognize patterns within those samples as they relate to language. From those patterns, it can mimic human answers to common language problems, like writing prompts from Millennial columnists and other content-creation-related endeavors. Its creators continue to fine-tune its capabilities, making its results increasingly better, and its use ever more ubiquitous. 

Released to the public in November 2022 by OpenAI, ChatGPT’s usership skyrocketed, reaching 100 million active users in two months, making it the fastest growth of any consumer application in history, according to a 2023 study by UBS. It had near-immediate implications on education, marketing, media and writing in general, making me (along with everyone else) wonder about the long-term impacts of its use on creative endeavors.

Personally, I decided a long time ago that I didn’t want to be someone who shies away from technology and progress, nor did I want to be the kind of person who is defined by it. I want to perpetually hold my own in the in-between spaces, involved and removed enough from both that I can understand technology and how to use it, while also being able to exist outside of it (thus capable of bearing witness to its small- and large-scale implications).

From this “one-foot-in-each-world” place, I can consider what ChatGPT is, and what it isn’t. Currently, ChatGPT can pull from existing ways of thinking about and describing the world, synthesizing the most common answers to frequently asked questions. It can reference pop culture, generate metaphors and describe human emotions (as described by the humans whose writing it learned from). 

Using ChatGPT, I can write a stanza by and about Moire Rose from Schitt’s Creek: 

From ‘bébé’ to ‘fold in the cheese’, 

Her lexicon weaves an eccentric frieze. 

In the pantheon of wit, she reigns supreme, 

A Moira Rose poem, a lighthearted dream. 

I can also generate a metaphor about the experience of “drawing a conclusion” as good as a synthesized version of everyone’s previous attempts to do so can hope to be: “Drawing a conclusion is the art of weaving disparate threads into a cohesive tapestry of comprehension, where clarity unfurls like the petals of a bloom, illuminating the once-shadowed landscape of uncertainty.”

But I can’t use ChatGPT to replicate the experience of writing something for myself. For example, to me, the experience of drawing a conclusion has more urgency than ChatGPT’s favored, “weaving of threads.” Instead, my metaphor has less agency and more reaction, like the “thwap” of a snapped guitar string, mid-song, or the feeling of turning the wrong way down a one-way street — where a drawn conclusion disrupts the way you were previously inhabiting the world.

Beyond its lackluster metaphor-building capabilities (yes, I just had a metaphor battle with a chatbot), ChatGPT will never be able to replicate the use of writing to better understand and process my own experiences. It can’t replicate my response to what’s happening in real-time, nor can it create from a place of instantaneous inspiration (as it is unable to reference something it hasn’t been introduced to yet).

Even as this technology advances, as it is sure to, where our AI-assisted world is built on ChatGPT-generated blog posts and books, screenplays and song lyrics, it will never be able to replace the insights and introspection that come from sitting down and thinking about how to word something; how to describe something. Typing a prompt into a text generator will never help me learn more about myself or achieve the kind of growth that’s built from contemplation, discovery, failure and effort.

At its core, ChatGPT is a tool — one that we can still decide how to wield. And hopefully, as we continue to shape it, we remember that technology, and the power we give it, is also irrevocably shaping us.