Saturday, October 14, 2023

To Use ChatGPT Or Not: A Writer's Dilemma

 


Although it is a story now past well gone, but do you remember the Hollywood writer’s strike?  I never really paid too much attention to it, not until today.  Apparently, there was a lot more at stake than I had realized.  At the crux  of the matter was how Artificial Intelligence (AI) would impact the writer’s ability to get the much-deserved credit, and most importantly, compensation for all of that hard work.

Probably even last year, this would not have been an issue at all, or even long before that.  As I have written before, AI has been around for a very long time.  In fact, I wrote an entire book about it, and I covered in some detail as to how AI will never be even remotely close to the human brain. 

The best that it will ever achieve in terms of business dominance is being used for automation purposes for mundane and routine tasks, and possible augmentation to other processes.

The primary reason why AI has become such a furor is the dawn of ChatGPT. It seems like everybody I know uses it, for good reasons of course.  But in the world of writing, no matter what the form is, authors and writers are now using this platform to create novels, books, manuscripts, etc.  While there is nothing legally wrong with this, I find ethical issues with it.

I mean I am all for using ChatGPT as an aid, or a supplementary tool, but not for using to write an entire manuscript.  You see, there is really nothing magical about ChatGPT.  It once again uses AI algorithms, most notably those of the GPT4.  So, to give you an idea of how it works, you simply tell ChatGPT the permutations of the content that you want to write, and wham-bham, it will give you something in just a few minutes.

But keep in mind that this is not original content!!!  Remember, ChatGPT is nothing but garbage in and garbage out.  So, as the input to give you your desired output, it will need content from other books, texts, manuscripts, etc.  The problem here is that ChatGPT will not tell you where it extracted its information from.  So if you end up somehow publishing this work, you run the risk of a lawsuit, if other authors and writers see that their work is in yours!!!

In fact, just recently, there have been a few lawsuits in this regard.  For me as a technical writer, I hardly put any emotion or throughs into the words I write.  My job is to merely take all of the complicated stuff that happens in the Cybersecurity world, and bring it down to a level that anybody can understand and apply.  Probably the best example of this is these blogs I write.

I look up articles on the Internet to see what the latest happenings are, and write it in such a way it is meaningful to you, and that you can apply it somehow in your everyday life.  I have never used ChatGPT for anything I have ever written, and I don’t ever intend to. 

It is my most heartfelt opinion that a writer or an author should be able to write content on their own, using their own style and voice.  Of course, one will need resources to use, and that is why there is Google, and I guess to a certain extent, ChatGPT.

But if you are a novelist or a creative writer of different sorts, ChatGPT will be of no use to you.  You see, AI cannot output sentiments, emotions, feelings, or anything like that.  It only gives you a directed output to what you are asking directly, through the various queries that you submit to it. 

So in this regard, you need to learn how to create meaningful queries, which are also known as “Prompts”.  In fact, a whole news of social science has evolved into this, officially known as “Prompt Engineering”.

My Thoughts On This:

Back to the Hollywood saga:  Eventually, the writers were able to an agreement to a contract.  They will get compensated and credit for the work that they have done, but in return, if they use ChatGPT or any other type of AI tool for content generation, then they have to explicitly state that in their respective manuscripts. 

Will we see more of theses kinds of disputes and lawsuits down the road?  I predict that there will be.  As ChatGPT evolves further, writers and authors will have different purposes for using it.  But I sincerely hope that anybody in the writing field, no matter what it might be, will use their natural brain much more so than an artificial one.

If you want to see an article which details some ChatGPTs disadvantages, click on the link below:

https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/chatgpt-other-generative-ai-apps-prone-to-compromise-manipulation

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