Much ado about ChatGPT

My column on artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, elicited many comments. One of the most interesting was from my son, Roel S.R. Cruz, a creative writing mentor, an unlikely pioneer in ChatGPT technology. His response:

Regarding the use of the equal parts bewildering and convenient ChatGPT, more than how we define “artificial” and “intelligence,” what is more critical is what measures we use to define what makes us human. Creativity? Critical thinking? The age-old fear of being replaced by machines and robots? Like any innovation, ChatGPT is a tool to be used to enhance human evolution. But the choice to use it as a replacement for actual humans/human endeavor is one that defines what makes one human as well.

Take food delivery apps, for instance. As introverts happy to spend endless time in each other’s company, my wife and I use Foodpanda heavily and blissfully. It even “knows” what we like based on previous orders and can complete a re-order from our favorite restaurant in a split second. But it doesn’t “know” my whims, my changes in taste, my moods that dictate my eating habits, what I’ll crave after watching my favorite basketball team either suffer a devastating loss or pull off a miraculous win.

But there are times when I’m too lazy to think and just randomly choose a past order. The app did not replace my ability to choose. But it still remained a very useful tool for me. (Including the Notes app on my phone where I am writing this! It’s very handy, but I’m not throwing away my laptop or stack of physical notebooks and pens anytime soon.)

As a literature teacher and creative writing mentor, ChatGPT has become one of many resources for me. I’ve asked it to come up with a course outline for 12th grade 21st century Literature, but scrapped more than half of the books it included in the reading list for my own preferences, based on my experience-gut intuition on what works would resonate better with my particular adult night HS students from La Salle Greenhills. I could have easily used what ChatGPT fed me and submitted it to my coordinator. But I chose not to. Again, that choice is what makes one human.

Linguist, political activist and social critic Noam Chomsky has called this new tool “basically high-tech plagiarism” and a “way of avoiding learning.” True, if one chooses to use it for that. Just imagine all the instant essays on the motif of donkeys and crows in Shakespeare’s plays, economic theories applied in contemporary society or the rise of fascism throughout history. ChatGPT can produce faster than you can say “Abracadabra,” given the right prompt.

I’ve never worried about this as a teacher, because my students have known me to assign more creative and personal-based tasks instead of the usual literary analysis essays that one could write before online research was in vogue because of easily accessible copies of Cliffs Notes (another tool that could be used for various aims!). Tangentially I’m reminded of a writer who once quipped, in defense of the humanities, that “in Jurassic Park, science showed us that dinosaurs can be cloned. The humanities will ask us if we should clone dinosaurs, and for what purpose.” Sure, we can ask ChatGPT to “read” an entire novel for us and give us the summary, key themes, etc. But should we? That question is left entirely to one’s humanity, ethics, moral code, personal quirks to answer.

Maybe this naivete is also what distinctly makes me human, but I think of ChatGPT as an enhanced variation of Google. It’s for everyone – whether you’re a businessman wanting to more quickly look up much needed data for a presentation, or a bored teen with nothing to do because your gaming hours have been restricted.

I’ve found myself using it to entertain myself: to write a poem about ice cream in the style of Emily Dickinson, a song about puppies in the style of Metallica, a TV pilot episode about an alien who becomes president of the Philippines. You can ask it who the greatest basketball player is, or if a certain president did indeed herald a certain country’s golden age, and it will basically ask you to look at various credible sources before deciding for yourself. Maybe most of us do need AI to remind us about critical thinking. But ask it to write a poem about hotdogs in the style of ee cummings and you will not regret it.

Will artificial intelligence start writing Nobel Prize-winning novels? Academy Award-winning screenplays? What I know is if it does, humanity will also evolve. I heard of a literary organization that publishes science fiction stories which had to go on hiatus because of the abundance of AI-generated story submissions. That gut instinct to check for plagiarism, that skepticism which sometimes comes in the form of the voice of your high school principal, “Always be sure before you’re certain!” – this is a distinct human trait.

And if AI develops the ability to recreate even that, then humans will choose to evolve to keep more than one step ahead. Or choose not to and let AI do your work so you can spend more time catching up on your favorite Netflix series. After all, to choose is human, to replicate and enhance is for tech online.

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