ChatGPT: Is it the future of technology? An existential threat to humanity? A fun tool to generate cheesy pickup lines? Whatever your opinions may be on ChatGPT, it’s undeniable that it has permanently changed technology. But what role will it play in the future of writing? It is already being used by college students across the country to plagiarize papers, often with impressive results. Artificial intelligence has even produced e-books. The prospect of artificial intelligence replacing writing is certainly terrifying, but is this a realistic fear? To find out, we put ChatGPT’s writing to the test.
ChatGPT was given a series of prompts for a variety of writing styles. The first was to “write a short story with a deeper meaning,” which ended up being a pretty decent, if slightly preachy, fairytale. Next, it wrote a review of “To Kill a Mockingbird” which came out disturbingly well. The most interesting result, however, came from the prompt “write a Pulizer-quality short story” — yes, there was a typo in the prompt. We wanted to see if AI could create a story with real depth, of the sort that one might see reviewed in a college daily newspaper. Luckily, it could not.
The story it produced with this prompt was called “The Last Summer.” It was about five friends spending their last summer together “before everything changed” — what the “everything” was that would change was never specified. They stumble upon a mysterious old house and spend the rest of the summer fixing it up as a refuge from “the heat and the worries of the world.” At the end of the summer, the friends make a pact to “always come back to this place, this moment, this feeling of pure joy.”
There was nothing strictly wrong with this story. Probably hundreds of books and movies have been written about friends spending a summer together and learning some greater truth about the universe. But there was something missing from this story. The tone as a whole, if skimmed, may have given the impression of high literary value, but there was no real substance to back it up. It was almost coy, full of deep-sounding sentences lacking real insights into why the characters were feeling the way they were. AI wrote, “We could feel the weight of the future pressing down on us,” but never tells us what was so burdensome about the futures of these five characters. The reader is also never told what about the summer made the characters feel “pure joy” or why it was “the last time we could feel truly happy.” Was it the satisfaction of rebuilding a house together? The lack of responsibility? There is some key context missing throughout the story.
ChatGPT even seems to attempt literary techniques such as foreshadowing and symbolism but is largely unsuccessful. It describes “a sense of foreboding in the air” before they find the house, which turns out not to be anything foreboding at all. This effort at foreshadowing gives the impression that the mysterious house will end up being a symbol — perhaps of the uncertainty of their futures — but it just ends up being their summer activity.
It is possible that it was simply the constraints of length that prevented ChatGPT from fully fleshing out the story. More likely, though, even the most brilliant computer scientists have not yet managed to create an AI which can understand complex human emotions, hopefully preventing it from ever truly mastering creative writing.
Although clearly, this story was nothing approaching “Pulizer-quality,” AI’s success in some of the other prompts it was given was disturbing. Particularly the “To Kill a Mockingbird”essay was shockingly close to the quality of many Tufts English papers.
There is no shortage of articles in the news right now discussing ChatGPT and AI in general. Many of them discuss the existential threat that ChatGPT poses to human creativity. If this unsuccessful short story is any proof, great writing thankfully seems to be out of AI’s reach — at least for now. But ChatGPT’s success brings up another important question: How often are humans actually creative? So much of the writing that is required in school follows the classic thesis, body, body, body, conclusion formula, all full of points that any reasonably well-read person probably could have come up with.
Students are trained to write professional, academic papers with neutral tones and absolutely zero first-person whatsoever. Understandably, so many students use AI to avoid the frustrating process of summarizing great literature or academic concepts in this form. Maybe now that ChatGPT has revealed just how little creativity it takes to write in this form, students should instead be trained to embrace their own unique voices and bring them into all their writing.
What truly makes something worth writing? There is certainly something to be said about writing for writing’s sake, or just for practice, but there is always room for creativity in even the most menial assignment. ChatGPT is not a threat to creativity in itself, it is only dangerous if we use it to avoid creativity. Like it or not, AI is here to stay, so maybe instead of being something to fear, its existence can serve as motivation to push ourselves to greater creativity in everything we do. Perhaps whenever we start writing something we should ask ourselves the question: What can I say that ChatGPT couldn’t?
