ChatGPT is the best thing to happen to writers – I’ll include we bloggers – says long time writer, newspaper editor and storyteller, Wendell Jamieson in Boston Globe Media this morning.
Writing needs our humor, rage, flare, and vulnerability – assuming legal bloggers are willing to go where the well read bloggers and writers go.
Jamieson sees it differently than the folks who see ChatGPT the demise of writers.
“Writing needed a boost long before ChatGPT came along — and I’m not just talking about misusing “literally,” “bemused,” or “the lion’s share.”
So much writing is lazy and clichéd, and ChatGPT is just the thing to prompt us human writers to improve, to embrace our own individual personalities and voices, and to write with force, drama, and humor — especially humor — in a way no AI program can. Otherwise, our business as writers will be finished.
ChatGPT follows rules with scientific precision. So we humans have to break rules. We’ve got to sweat every word. We have to find similes and analogies and shifts in viewpoint and timbre that are so specific to each of us that ChatGPT’s “writing” will read like personality-free pablum — smooth, logical, comprehensible pablum, perhaps, but pablum nonetheless.”
I’ve labeled more than one legal as pablum. Summaries that a first year law student could do – which machines will now do better.
Want some inspiration to write. Jamieson can’t conjour up machines coming up with what what some of the best have written. Nor can I – at least yet.
“Harper Lee in the opening pages of “To Kill a Mockingbird” describing a hot summer’s day in Alabama: “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
Raymond Chandler in “Farewell, My Lovely” encountering a hulking wrestler while unarmed: “I wasn’t wearing a gun … I doubted if it would do me any good. The big man would probably take it away from me and eat it.”
Mark Twain sounding remarkably contemporary when he wrote: “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.””
Good inspiration for me to get back to my writing of twenty plus years ago when blogging gave us a license to write with feeling.
At the same, I have a publishing company with about 40,000 bloggers writing on our platform. I am going to use AI to help them be more effective and engaging writers.
It’s possible without them becoming lazy or boring writers.
Thanks Wendell.