Could ChatGPT write the next Jabberwocky?

Don’t worry.  This isn’t one of those ubiquitous social-media scenarios: someone asks ChatGPT a question, then posts a screenshot of its polite and cheery answer.

(If you really want a key differentiator between human and machine, manners might be it.  ChatGPT is unfailingly nice).

Instead, I’m going to discuss some of the ways in which AI could help you become your best creative self.

Know your enemy

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into that pesky little chatbot, ChatGPT.  Partly because I’m writing a book on how to write humanly, and partly because I keep hearing about how it’s going to put freelance writers like me out of work.

But as with most of my half-whispered fears, the more I delve into the detail, the less I worry.  Some of my work will probably disappear, but only the basic drudgery I didn’t much like doing in the first place.

The reason?  Even the largest of large language models only provide what’s linguistically obvious.  In The New Yorker, Cal Newport talks about how ChatGPT’s “functionality seems limited to, more or less, writing about combinations of known topics using a combination of known styles, where ‘known’ means that the program encountered a given topic or style enough times during its training”.

Later, an illuminating, in-depth article in The Economist reported that “GPT-3 has already been trained on what amounts to all of the high-quality text that is available to download from the internet”.

Take creativity to the next level

Clearly there’s a whole lot more to consider, but the general outlook is positive for writers like me.  While chatbots can make creative connections, they’re the equivalent of the clichéd old lines we already see here, there, and everywhere.  Lines like “bring your dreams to life” and “take things to the next level”.  Fine if you want to get a readable message across; not so much if you also want readers to feel surprised or delighted, or personally connect with what you’re telling them.

OK, we human writers have to up our creative game, but that’s a very exciting prospect indeed.

Here’s another incentive to go creatively crazy.  Even if AI were to come up with something utterly unique and nonsens-ational, we probably wouldn’t trust it.

Let’s take Lewis Carroll’s classic nonsense poem Jabberwocky as an example:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

(Word’s spelling and grammar-checker had a field day with that verse!)

When machines produce nonsense it’s clearly a mistake; if a chatbot had written Jabberwocky, the whole thing would most likely have been dismissed as a mad systems glitch.

But as humans, we can play around with language and create brand-new words.  It’s natural and fun, and it can be utterly spellbinding.  As a child, reading Jabberwocky for the first time made my mind go all gooey.  I learned that words could whisk me away to a magical place I could almost walk around in… and someone had made them up and written them down, all the way back in the 1850s!

I felt both inspired to write myself, and strangely connected with a creative genius I could never meet.

Why Your Job is Harder than God’s

The headline above is a section title from a fantastic little book called How Not to Write a Novel.  It talks about how novelists have an exceedingly difficult job, because if something unlikely happens in real life – like one man being struck by lightning five times – “we do not question that it would happen”.

As a novelist, when you create an unlikely event it has to happen “in a world in which the event is interrelated with everything around it, so it appears to the reader something that might naturally happen”.

In other words, fictional stories have to make sense because when we read them, we know they aren’t really real.  We expect an entertaining yarn with a believable ending, just like we expect machines to write grammatically-perfect, soulless prose.

Humans are messy and imperfect, just like life.  But that means we get to stake our claim on the real and the nonsensical.   It’s a unique gift: our reward for having consciousness and a deep craving for like-minded connection.

So let’s go forth and use it.

If you’ve always wanted to write your life story (or a loved one’s, for that matter), I’m running an online ‘planning tips with Q&A’ session on Wednesday 31^st May, at 6pm GMT. 

It costs £5 to join the session… which is redeemable against my new online course, How To Write Your Life Story.

Contact me if you have any questions, or would like to book a place.  I’d love to see you there!