ChatGPT and Lived Experience
Where now for writing?
Everything everywhere is always moving. Forever.
Now, everything is moving faster and farther in the world of writing. The dust has yet to settle on the latest vigorous movement in the life of LLMs. But the signs point toward substantial, lasting change.
Almost certainly, a tidal wave of written content and difficulty in detecting what is true and what is truly worth reading.
Will LLMs like ChatGPT occupy the middle zone of the written world, pushing human writing to the tails?
Poetic high peaks and one-pass, unpolished, punk and crafty valleys. A sanitised, homogenised, mediocre zone of mass produced automation in the middle.
Perhaps the act of writing will be increasingly a tool for thinking and preserved as an almost sacred thing like Taleb in tribute to early Christian scholars.
I asked ChatGPT directly. It suggested, rather unconvincingly, that LLMs would not replace human writing.
Although LLMs (Language Learning Machines) may be able to generate written content with high levels of accuracy and fluency, they are not capable of capturing the unique perspective and creativity of human writers.
Writing is an important form of communication and expression that allows people to share their ideas, experiences, and emotions with others.
The emphasise on writing to capture human experience makes me think of the most extreme version of this. The Piraha of the Amazon practice an Immediacy of Experience Principle in their culture that is firmly embedded in their language:
Pirahas avoid formulaic encodings of values and instead transmit values and information via actions and words that are original in composition with the person acting or speaking, that have been witnessed by this person, or that have been told to this person by a witness.
The Piraha people do not talk about unexperienced events, generalisations or broad comparisons. Their language is grounded in the local. The act of witnessing is central to their communication.
This does not appear to diminish the role of storytelling. Everyday stories play a vital binding role. They are enjoyed and enjoyable.
What relevance for the Future of Writing?
With powerful, paradigm-shifting technological changes it is worth considering what exactly the technology cannot do. What can they never do?
An LLM cannot witness.
Witnessing and describing experience is a protected niche.
Prepare for a flourishing of first-person accounts: of storytelling and the human perspective. Little islands of human-ness amongst the rising tide of automated mediocrity.
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Sources & Inspiration
ChatGPT
Don't Sleep There are Snakes, Daniel Everett
The Dawn of Mediocre Computing, Venkatesh Rao
How I write, Nassim Nicholas Taleb