You, Me, and ChatGPT
Three’s a Crowd
Good morning and welcome to the first step of the apocalypse, in which we meet our destructor and underestimate them. I hope you have been honing your apocalypse skill because you may find you need it soonish. In today’s Shelf Life I’m going to talk a bit about ChatGPT, what it is, and how it’s affecting and disrupting the publishing industry as I know it (so far).
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence–based chatbot software. To begin, I’m going to define a few terms (and their abbreviations) because I’ll use them a bunch in this essay.
Artificial intelligence (AI)—the ability of a machine to imitate or approximate intelligent human behavior; or, the branch of computer science studying the simulation of intelligent behavior by computers.
Artificial neural network (ANN), or neural net—a computing system modeled on human and animal brains in which numerous nodes (artificial neurons) transmit information to one another.
Machine learning (ML)—a type of AI in which a computer uses algorithms, and the data to which it has access, to imitate the way humans learn.
Language model (LM)—the use of probability and statistics to predict what word will come next in a sequence of words.
Put it all together now:
Large language model (LLM)—a language model that uses an artificial neural network to analyze massive quantities of unlabeled text as its dataset and employ machine learning to improve the accuracy of its language capabilities over time.
And for good measure:
Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT)—a type of large language model that is pre-trained on large sets of unlabeled text to generate their own text that approximates what a human might generate.
There’s more, way more, but I’m not smart enough to talk about it intelligently. I have a friend who is an AI scientist and he reads sometimes and if he’s reading this I know he is shaking his head at the very elementary explanations I have given above. He should be writing the first half of this essay, probably.
If you’ve heard people talking about ChatGPT and wondered what it was—well, now you probably know, or can wager an educated guess, based on the above. ChatGPT is an AI-based chatbot available on the web for anyone to use. Some interesting use cases I have seen or heard about lately include:
My company’s CEO, who writes an internal blog post for staff each week, had ChatGPT write one week’s entry for him. He later revealed he had used ChatGPT to write it, and initiated a conversation about AI use.
My boss gave ChatGPT some parameters and had it draft annual departmental goals for her, to compare with the ones she had created herself.
A real estate company that now uses ChatGPT to write all descriptions of houses and property to populate MLS listings.
A colleague who used ChatGPT to draft a description of a podcast episode, to compare to the human-written description, for use on Spotify and other podcast outlets.
In short, you don’t just chat with ChatGPT. You can also ask it to write for you. I mean, you can ask it to do a lot of things. What can’t you ask it to do?
Do you want Skynet? Because this is how we get Skynet.
Anyway. When I said ChatGPT can write for you, either your ears perked up or your heart sank into your stomach, depending on how you feel about, you know, human beings being involved in the creative process.
Could someone, potentially, use ChatGPT for more than copywriting? Could someone use it to write a short story, or a novel? Well, plenty of people have tried. Enough people, in fact, that Clarkesworld magazine closed to submissions on February 20 after bombardment by AI-generated submissions.
So one might ask: If you can tell the difference between a human-written story and an AI-written story, why did Clarkesworld need to close? Couldn’t they just throw out the AI subs? Alternately, if you can’t tell the difference between a human-written story and an AI-written story, then do the AI submissions deserve a shot at publication?
Clarkesworld has not revealed the method they use to identify AI-written stories, but they can identify them. However, I suspect it’s not that easy to machine-screen AI-generated stories out of the queue, which means slush readers will be overwhelmed with submissions as they have to read at least a bit of each manuscript to determine which ones should be thrown out because they’re written by AI—as opposed to which ones should be thrown out because they aren’t Clarkesworld material and which ones should move forward for editorial consideration.
The problem with machine-screening for AI-generated content is the AI will learn to get around the machine-screening. The machine-screening will learn the AI’s new tricks, and then the AI will learn again. That’s how all of this works, I guess. I don’t know, I’m not a computer scientist.
There are some things that a human being with a minimal amount of training and/or common sense can pick up immediately that can stump a computer. As an example, computers/AI sometimes find it hard to look at a diagram of a randomized trial with multiple arms and tell you which number is the full set (N) and which are the subsets (n) given that the full set included in the study is not always the largest number in the illustration. Meanwhile, a person who has been given a basic explanation can usually find the big N right away.
My day job is in scholarly publishing (medical journals), and ChatGPT is a hot topic of conversation there, too. I won’t reveal any internal discussions on ChatGPT for my specific job, but I’d like to share this open-access article from Lancet Digital Health: Generating Scholarly Content With ChatGPT: Ethical Challenges for Medical Publishing. Authors of scholarly work are already using ChatGPT to assist in writing papers, and even featuring ChatGPT as an author on the byline of some papers. For instance, I found an article (Open Artificial Intelligence Platforms in Nursing Education: Tools for Academic Progress or Abuse?) in the January issue of Nurse Education in Practice that was coauthored by a human being and ChatGPT.
This does raise some concerns. For one, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)—the organization that sets forth best practices for medical journal publishing—advises that an author must agree “to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.” That is something ChatGPT cannot do, however smart it may be.
That’s not to say ChatGPT can’t be used as a tool by human beings to assist with writing tasks. It certainly can be (millions of people are using it this way already). How else are people around the writing, editing, and publishing industry using it?
There was a TikTok going around a while ago about using ChatGPT to write your query letter to agents, which, I’m somewhat dubious. One of the things I tested out on ChatGPT was asking it to write a cover letter for me for a job. I gave it a generic job title that I was “applying for” and a few of my relevant qualifications, and it did indeed pump out a fairly serviceable cover letter. It was a bit of a dry, cookie-cutter cover letter, but that’s kind of what you want in a cover letter when you’re applying for a job. Here is part of my result:
Dear Hiring Manager,
I am excited to apply for the Medical Editor position at [Company Name]. As a Board Certified Editor in the life sciences with over 8 years of experience in medical editing management, I am confident that my skills and expertise make me a perfect fit for the role.
During my career, I have gained extensive experience in managing and overseeing medical editing projects, working with interdisciplinary teams, and ensuring quality control of medical content. My experience in managing teams of medical editors has equipped me with exceptional leadership and organizational skills, which are essential in delivering high-quality medical content to your clients.
After I read the cover letter, I asked ChatGPT the following: “Now, can you make it a little bit humorous?”
Dear Hiring Manager,
I am excited to apply for the Medical Editor position at [Company Name]. As a Board Certified Editor in the life sciences with over 8 years of experience in medical editing management, I am confident that my skills and expertise make me a perfect fit for the role.
Before we dive in, I have to warn you that I have a severe allergy to misplaced commas and run-on sentences. So, if you're looking for someone to help you navigate the tricky world of medical editing, I'm your person.
Fortunately, I’m still funnier than that—but it’s a near thing. My role as your funny writer/editor friend could be in jeopardy. I will be working on my apocalypse skill right after I finish writing this. I might have to rebrand as your funny end-of-the-world seamstress friend.
I would say, though, that “dry and cookie-cutter” isn’t the phrase you want to describe your literary agent query letter. I wrote a brief synopsis of Pride and Prejudice with the title and character names changed and asked ChatGPT to pitch it to a fictional literary editor and the result was generic and uninspired.
"Prestige and Preconception" is an enemies-to-lovers story about Lisa Benét, a young woman whose parents are pushing her to get married. Lisa doesn't want to get married, but she feels pressure to comply with her parents' wishes. When she meets Milo Chadster, a handsome man with whom she gets off on the wrong foot, Lisa finds herself torn between her attraction to him and her determination to stay single. Milo and Lisa meet several times and their encounters are fraught with tension and animosity, despite their strong chemistry.
Listen, if you can’t pitch Pride and Prejudice to a literary agent I must question your letter-writing credentials.
What I am getting at with all this is: You can’t send a computer to do a human’s creative job—yet. Maybe that day is coming or maybe we’ll all have to get better at what we do. I don’t know, I’m not a fortune teller.
But you can ask a computer to help you with your creative job. You can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm with you, to come up with a basic synopsis for you to edit based on criteria you enter, or even suggest titles for your story. What you get back won’t pass for the excellent work of a creative human, but it can definitely give you something to get a creative human started.
At the end of the day, aim to write in such a way as to be inimitable. Related: Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play.
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