Problems with chatbots
Creativity might be at stake
The public’s response to tools like ChatGPT is a mix of wonder and apprehension and rightly so. Chatbots with artificial intelligence is a game changer in the writing industry since it can easily produce paragraphs of cogent argument and storytelling. But this also puts the future of writing and speech in peril.
Online rumors of the impending demise of copywriters, programmers, and other authors have proliferated, and while these rumors may be overstated, chatbots are unquestionably a powerful weapon. Its ability to produce written material in a matter of seconds is astonishing, and in terms of rhetorical power, it easily outperforms several million human writers. But does that mean it will do anything just because it can?
We frequently take satisfaction in working more efficiently rather than harder. In many ways, using ChatGPT to generate written content is similar to using calculators to conduct mathematical computations or spell check to correct spelling mistakes. In a world when the entirety of human knowledge can fit in a pocket, the prominence of essay writing in schools is a reflection of the demise of memorization as a technique of teaching and learning. Outsourcing writing to ChatGPT has the drawback that it does not necessitate a personal synthesis of facts, which is necessary to really comprehend a subject.
When it comes to this issue, English teachers may soon be asking the same thing math teachers have been pondering for decades: “when will we ever need this knowledge in real life?” The truth is that when we graduate from college, we might not ever need to compute a definite integral. In a similar vein, we might never need to write a five-paragraph essay on Austin’s portrayals of socioeconomic class. However, comprehending ourselves and the environment we live in requires the capacity to create and organize words in a manner that is truly our own. Writing and editing are two very different things. Editing entails utilizing the language we already have rather than coming up with new language structures.
Without writing, we would have to live by other people’s language or, worse yet, by an overconfident AI chatbot.
I’m sure I would have leaped at the chance to use these bots to generate my essays, but I am aware that writing and editing differ in much the same way that reading and writing do. Though writing helps us better comprehend ourselves and the world around us, reading is still crucial. These chatbots pose a danger to the future of writing and language. While it may be tempting to outsource writing to this AI chatbot, it is essential that we understand the importance of personal synthesis and the ability to structure language in a way that is uniquely our own.
