Why Humans Will Always Be Better Writers than ChatGPT: How to Beat AI
I hope this heading is arrogant enough. Beat that, ChatGPT!
This is where I explain what ChatGPT is. In short, I asked it to do so.
It replied: “ChatGPT uses deep learning to generate text responses. It’s trained on a large amount of text data and uses that information to predict what the next word in a sentence should be, based on the context. It uses this information to generate a response to a given prompt or input.”
ChatGPT is like Google, which went to a private school in Britain: It explains in detail in one go.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, thanks, ChatGPT.
Here’s how humans will always be better writers than ChatGPT:
If you ask ChatGPT what you get when you mix the internet and banking, it will say internet banking.
This is how I teach innovation in books and workshops. I say innovation is creating utility for a user: sometimes it’s mixing utilities to create a new utility.
Banking is a utility as it can safeguard people’s money and also be used to pay people far away safely. You can get mugged when you travel with cash.
The internet is a utility as you can pay people through your bank over it.
The two utilities (banking and internet) — created years ago and millennia apart — were fused to create a new agile utility called internet banking.
ChatGPT knows this because it is written somewhere on the internet. It reads the internet.
Our job as humans is to create new utilities that do not exist yet.
As writers, our job is to create things that have not been written before.
For example, imagine you are a fictional writer. You write about a cop at the start of a jail film, coming to arrest the main character. He reads him his rights and then arrests him.
This scene can be boring. Anyone can write or imagine it. This is the kind of scene ChatGPT writes. It’s sort of straight and has been written before.
ChatGPT cannot write what has not been said before elsewhere distinctly.
Now, as the writer, it’s your job to write (create) unique moments within the scene that make it interesting, edgy, and novel, such as a dirty joke that has never been said before.
This is how you will beat ChatGPT.
You can skip this…
I once wrote a comical article that spoke of how great teachers pee. The gist of the article was that great teachers teach from uncomfortable experiences.
I told the story of how I once wet my bed in boarding school and how I innovated a way which made sure I never did again.
I never wet my bed again — or at least I never wet my blankets and pants.
It’s graphic. I will spare you the mechanics of the innovation. It’s embarrassing.
Chatbots cannot combine and articulate such experiences and lessons thereof: teaching, innovation, graphics, embarrassment, and humor, all fused spectacularly.
As writers, our job is to articulate and explore combinations which AI cannot yet guess. This, to me, is the high destiny of writing: to explore novel territories. It has always been. Chatbots are forcing us to do it.
FYI
I edited this article with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT replied to the article above in the following manner
I appreciate your bold statement and your willingness to challenge ChatGPT. While it’s true that ChatGPT can generate responses based on patterns it has learned from the vast amount of text data it has been trained on, it cannot replicate the unique creativity and perspective that humans bring to writing.
As you mentioned, humans have the ability to create new and unique combinations of ideas and experiences, to explore uncharted territories and to express complex emotions in ways that AI cannot yet replicate. These qualities are what make human writing so valuable and irreplaceable.
In addition, humans have the ability to understand the context and nuance of a situation, to pick up on subtle cues and to empathize with the reader. This allows us to tailor our writing to specific audiences and to evoke emotional responses that AI is not yet capable of.
So, while ChatGPT is certainly impressive in its ability to generate text, it cannot replace the creativity and empathy that humans bring to writing. As writers, it’s our job to continue to explore new ideas and to express ourselves in ways that are uniquely human. By doing so, we can continue to create value and meaning in a world where AI is increasingly ubiquitous.
