Writing & Self-Transformation: Writing Changes Us. If an AI Chatbot Does It, We Lose.

Some thoughts on the transformative power of writing and creativity in the face of all the chatbot-talk everywhere. Plus The Atlantic's database of writer's work that has been scraped to train AI.

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

Recently, my husband asked ChatGPT to write me a poem. Which it did.

“It’s not actually that bad,” he said, as we read through it, laughing.

One of the best articles I’ve read this year was the hilariously chilling transcript of tech-writer, Kevin Roose’s several hour conversation with Bing’s chatbot. Among many other amazing things, it professed its love for Roose, begged Roose to leave his wife, and also discussed its shadow self. If you haven’t read it, you must. It is not to be missed.

Amusement aside, it seems like every time I pick up the NYTimes lately, there is a major article about AI and ChatGPT. Most recently, I read a piece on how college admissions people are worried that applicants will use ChatGPT to write their essays, with some colleges are simply assuming this will happen and laying out the do’s and don’ts for using AI when crafting these essays. Another was about how schools are no longer going trying to prevent student use of chatbots to do their writing, but instead teach AI as a tool for learning.

Will we all learn how to use AI? Probably.

And I get it. AI is a tool, it’s here to stay, my professor friends are already in the thick of trying to figure out if students are actually writing the papers they hand in or not, so maybe the best course of action is to assume everyone will use chatbots to write their papers and essays and help everyone learn how to best use this flawed technology.

BUT.

I want to talk about the act of writing itself for a minute. The act of writing for ourselves and regardless of what it is that we are writing—papers, essays, a novel, a memoir. How the actual composition of words, the creative impulse to do such a thing, the penning of words to paper or on a laptop, and how this work—because it is work, creative work—that we do, is a gift to ourselves, to our person, to our lives.

We become when we write. We become and we change and transform.

I write for so many different reasons. I write to figure out who I am. I write to figure out what I think. I write to try and grasp the meaning of a past experience, or a past relationship. I write to try and understand how I feel about something in my present. I very often write in order to grieve. (For a little more about this, see my earlier post: How I Grieve Through My Writing.)

Each time I sit down to write through something about myself, my life, my loves and love, the experience changes me. I am changed through my writing for the better. I experience catharsis, relief, become more hopeful, see new possibilities of living, loving, of the future itself. Unless I do the work myself, I will not experience the transformation of that work.

Reading changes us, of course, and we discuss this so much in the conversation about reading in schools and as we’re growing up and in terms of getting people to experience cultures, identities, experiences that are not their own. But we don’t talk quite as much about the act of writing as a transformative experience and process.

So making writing, the composing of a story or an idea, easier via AI isn’t the point, in my opinion. The point of us writing is also personal, it is person-building. I am who I am because I have written. (I know that may sound cheesy and is also an echo of Descartes, but it’s also true!)

When we give this possibility of self-transformation via our writing away to AI, we are the ones who ultimately lose. Because we are giving away ourselves.

And on this note:

Before I go I’d like to mention The Atlantic’s database where you can find out if your books (or the books of an author you love) have been “scraped” to train AI how to write. If you are a published writer of books, you should put your name into the database and see if your book/s come up. The database is unfortunately behind a paywall but you can subscribe for free for 30 days to use it—which I did.

When I put in my name, five of my books came up, including one of my novels, plus my memoir (which is perhaps the most upsetting one to have come up): CONSENT: A MEMOIR OF UNWANTED ATTENTION.

I put in friends’ names too and often at least one or more of their books came up as well. It is so upsetting.

I can’t get out of this circle of vicious thinking which is this: the people behind AI, have taken my writing and the writing of others and used it to create a technological tool that is designed with the express purpose of making it so humans never need to employ their own creativity or write on their own—and trained these tools by illegally using my work so AI can then go and write like I do! That is literally what has happened. My words and writing style have been inputted into AI so that AI can then later write like Donna Freitas. And like every other author and writer that you love and I love. The people behind AI have stolen my research, my experiences, my words, my trauma (!!), my grief, my hope, my creativity, the most personal, special, cathartic and important aspect of who I am, my very humanity, to train AI like all of this—like I—mean nothing. The creators of AI have objectified me and all that I am—and done this to every writer you know and maybe also to you—so other people can ask AI to write like we do. How fucked up is that?

Last thing: if you are a writer and your work has also been scraped, see this helpful response from the Author’s Guild about what you can do, and the big class action lawsuit that is happening about this very issue on behalf of writers whose work has been stolen.