Thank Gawd Writing is Dying

This is also a blog about writing.

Rachel Shin writes,

"... the recent explosition of AI-generated writing, namely by ChatGPT, which can instantly produce extremely sophisticated and novel text on any topic, in any style.  If anyone can prompt a computer to produce college-level essays and poetry in perfect iambic pentameter, what's the point of a writing education."

The remainder of the article provides a competent discussion about the ramifications ChatGPT has for post-secondary schools, specifically in the way it might obliterate the present value for essay writing as an education.  The article expresses the stand-by cliches about who gets replaced and what gets replaced, and whether there should be concern.  What the article does not do is evaluate any of the precepts upon which universities have been founded, for hundreds of years, which ChatGPT demonstrably explodes.

Iambic pentameter is a bullshit, useless communication device that, while touted as an artform, has been wrung dry of nuance and relevance through overuse.  It has as much use as a writing device, or an artform, as Morris dancers.

Yet it appears as the poster child in Shin's article, of all the things she could have chosen to fret over, because trotting out this crap as "important" is what university does.  Turns out, writing in iambic pentameter is difficult because a human has to have a lot of words in his or her head, to be able to construct the meter involved and yet make sense.  But a computer has ALL the words, at it's fingertips.  And so, like slide rules, paper draughting and horse-drawn carts, the relevancy of iambic pentameter is ready to be thrown in the dustbin.  What's a university poetry professor to do?

Poetry in academia collapsed as a social dynamo decades ago ... yet still it shambles on, sustained endlessly by grants, government-funded resources and a cadre of elitist ivory tower dwellers who continue to embrace the idea that more than 0.01% of the real world gives a rat fuck who became Grand Poet Poobah of the world in 2022.  ChatGPT is killing university poetry?  Good.

Is it threatening popular song lyrics ... something millions of people do care about.  No.  Song lyrics are metre-friendly because tonality demands they must be so.  The emotive value of song lyrics, however, is not that they cause us to "reflect on our own emotions," but because we connect personally with what's been said and feel elated that someone understands the shit we go through.  The words themselves are less important than what they communicate.  University has whiffed on this ball for so long, it was old hat when I took writing and English courses.  Academia is concerned with HOW something is said, not WHAT is said.  ChatGPT stabs a knife into that thinking.

The purpose of writing is not to interpret the purpose of writing.  Professors of English and numerous cultural studies have sustained themselves on this recursiveness ... and now the emptiness of that motif is in the process of being exposed.  Take this quote:

"So how can educators preserve writing even as it is actively assailed? Rather than abandon the city under siege, teachers should defend it with renewed investment. High schools might find inspiration in a university-inspired intensive focus model, an approach I have found great value in. In “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” one of the most popular English courses at Yale, students participate in essay workshops in which they carefully explain their authorial decisions, from broad-stroke thesis analyses down to diction choices."

The preservation of writing is in having something to say, not how it's said.  Not what choices were made in workshops.  Not in structural templates of writing the modern essay.  The "modern essay" has just ceased to be what Yale pretends it is.  The version Yale wants to defend, that it wants to go on teaching, is a suffocating fish flopping on stones hundreds of feet from water ... pretending that how it flops matters.

I have no fears about ChatGPT.  It might well replace me in the job I'm doing now, which is writing boilerplate language for company quarterly reports.  It isn't Shakespeare.  With some improvements, I can definitely see the staff halved in 2-3 years.  We've discussed it between ourselves; none of us are pretending.

But this that I'm writing now?  Oh, probably.  I'm sure a computer can be taught to rant.  It has ALL the knowledge in the world too.  On the other hand, I did something a two paragraphs back that would be a neat trick for a non-thinking being.  I rewrote the quote from 1968's The Lion in Winter, a quote I despise, as a fish giving credence to its death flops.  The lines from the film go,

Geoffrey: Why you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

What a pile of shit.  Intoning the phrase deeply doesn't make it less ridiculous or mastubatory.  It's not the fall that matters, it's whether or not anyone ever gave a shit that the fall happened at all.  For your fall to matter, the killer has to care ... and why in fuck would a killer care, except in an overly romantised, ponderous, self-important screenplay?  The movie is trash, lauded by folk who think trash is clever ... but of course the greater society, that beyond the pretense of academics, has no idea the play even exists.  Most who know the line, saw it on West Wing.

Can a program connect the dots to build the parallel metaphor?  We'll see.

The marvelous thing about technology is how it washes away the long-accumulated detritus.  All the past dead things that old folks stubbornly embrace as something valuable end up in the trash bin.  Where it belongs.  Sheet music for folks on their home pianos, vinyl records, radio, television and so on served its purpose when such was all there was ... but we are well rid of it.  What education that remains in 20 years, as the masturbatory practices of writing are gutted from the process, is sure to be better than the dumbfuckery I experienced 30 years ago, and is certainly worse and less purposeful today.