He wasn’t a native speaker, and his English left much to be desired. It was his second face-to-face tutorial with me. At the previous one, he showed me an essay so obviously put together by a chatbot that I had to reprimand him for wasting my time.
“Did you bring your own work this time round?” I asked. “Well, half of it is my own,” he muttered. He then produced a massive state-of-the-art smartphone and showed me an ad for Sudowrite—an AI writing program. It described itself as, "non-judgmental"—an unexpectedly creative AI writing tool that sounds like you, not a robot.
Without realising it, he had supplied me with a strong argument. I told him that he had to decide whether he wanted to just sound like himself, or actually be himself, in his life and career.
“I have to think about it,” he said and, having picked up his essay, left the office...
The use of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has become of increasing concern to me during my three years as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Cambridge. My role was to tutor students in writing. And although I was able to pinpoint only a dozen or so obvious attempts at chatbot cheating (wouldn’t it be better to call them “cheatbots”?) on the part of my tutees, I could not help noticing the threat to their creativity, as well as integrity, increasing term by term.
Chatbots, undoubtedly, have lots of good uses. But, in my opinion, they are totally unsuitable for writing anything, except perhaps for some dodgy tax returns.
As someone who has had his own Wikipedia page since 2001 (it was created by a reader of mine, a young British astronomer), I am flabbergasted by the huge inaccuracies and outright lies that pop up on AI-generated so-called celebrity database websites, most of which, thankfully, last only a short time before disappearing. According to an AI chatbot itself, “the landscape of celebrity information is increasingly driven by AI”. Here’s a compilation of quotes about yours truly from those sneaky sites (often using the “wiki” prefix to look more authentic) which I had managed to save before they vanished.
In one such article, not only did AI make me 22 years younger (thanks for that!) but, having named my birthplace correctly as “Kharkov, Ukraine”, claimed in the next sentence that my “birth country” is Russia! And how about the stylistic, as well as factual, perfection of the following sentence: “Kharkov (sic) is a beautiful and populous city located in Kharkov, Ukraine”?
According to that article, my father was not called Vladimir, as he was in reality, but Maurizio (??). My wife has a nice-sounding name, Anna Vissi (it would be interesting to meet her one day), whereas my “sexual orientation” and, thankfully, my “Waste (sic) Size”, were still “being updated”!
Here’s a paragraph from another pseudo-wiki: “Vitali’s estimated net worth is between $3m and $5m”—they forgot to include my state pension—“collected mostly from Yeezy sneakers... The money he pulled in from his profession is enough to rank him as one of the biggest celebrity cashouts of all time, his basic income source is mostly from being a successful journalist...”
Seriously, you couldn’t make this up, even if you wanted to. It looks like that, in order to to compile my “bio”, the indiscriminate ChatGPT had mixed the online data of Roman Abramovich and Nicolas Sarkozy, before adding to that absurd cocktail a sprinkle of Silvio Berlusconi...
All those grotesque “writings” are not as innocent as they seem. They muddle up and destroy your identity—both stylistically and factually, replacing it with delirious gibberish. The fact that, among all that “net worth” nonsense, they could get certain facts (like, say, the name of my dog) correct is misleading to the point that could make the whole thing believable for the innocent.
In the words of Konstantin Paustovsky, my first, Soviet, life’s favourite author, writing is but a mysterious interaction between an author’s mind, his hand and a sheet of white paper, whereas most AI writing programs are only capable of regurgitating other people’s thoughts with already existing data. An intelligent plagiarism of sorts! Or, as another student of mine aptly put it, “a finely crafted word salad.”
At times, not so “finely”, I can add...
Paradoxically, I found an unexpected supporter in... AI itself. On the advice of an IT-savvy friend of mine, I asked my PC’s inbuilt chatbot: “What are the drawbacks of having AI write an essay for you?”
The answer appeared on my screen within a fraction of a second: “Quality and plagiarism concerns...” Hear, hear... Right from the horse’s mouth!
For a few weeks, I feared the student with the chatbot essay would never return to my office. But one day he did. “I want to be myself!” he announced on entering my office.
This time, his essay was far from perfect and needed a lot of work, but I could discern his own voice in it. It pleased me to see him not just “sounding” like himself, but actually being himself. Because, and to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, being yourself is the biggest luxury that life can afford.
