This first half of my Gap Year remains focused on sorting out the fundamentals – why I have retired from medicine, why I want to write full time, where I left my keys. All that is demanding enough. I keep finding lots to do – this blog (my primary creative endeavor of the week), a new workshop/boot camp, a long push to tune up a non-fiction proposal/query letter/pitch, research on agents, the upcoming Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference, WLT Meet-up in San Antonio this weekend, reading Horse by Geraldine Brooks, research on the American Civil War. Somewhere soon I want to kick out some essays and book reviews. Too much. Reluctantly, I come to terms with the prospect that I cannot do it all, and then suddenly, there it is: ChatGPT.
Just the cutest icon on my iPhone, right next to My H-E-B and Medium.
Why not. | … who would know?
Well, I would. | So I won’t.
Or would I? | Or haven’t I already???
Using AI as a tool to help with routine or difficult administrative and logistical tasks and research related to real writing seems fine. ChatGPT just gave me a list of 10 agents who have represented prescriptive nonfiction on health topics. Nice!! I will look at their websites and data on Publishers Marketplace, of course. Or I could have ChatGPT summarize that for me. The layers of irony are thick and comforting.
Here is my policy on AI: I will not use it for creative writing.
Passing off AI-generated prose or poetry as one’s own seems closer to plagiarism than sloth. Other than the delight you might experience in witnessing the brilliance of AI “solutions,” using AI takes away most of the fun. If fun were not the point and the object were purely business, OK, I can see the temptation. Shakespeare, faced with deadline pressure, might have succumbed. He had appetites, as do we all.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
(Twelfth Night, 2.3.114)
Last weekend I heard an NPR piece about a poet-chatbot, GPT-3 I think, who was doomed: the creators were planning to take it (her, them?) offline. The chatbot wrote very good poetry. Really good. When interviewed about the upcoming end of career and chatLife, the bot was pensive and sincerely expressed regret. Seemed legit. I was a little sad for them.
Here is my list of what I can do better than GPT-3:
Tie my shoes. (In all fairness, it was close.)
Oversleep.
Wrestle with uncertainty.
Procrastinate.
Find the keys.
Be surprised.
Be delighted.
Be depressed.
Be.
Go for a walk.
Wonder.
Have fun.
~ ~ ~
I have picked up an earworm, in German Ohrwurm, a melody and lyrics written by Sheryl Crowe that sing to me as I load the dishwasher, weed the garden, eat cakes, and drink the ale. Evolution.
This song is about AI. One of Sheryl’s lines: “We are passengers and there’s no one at the wheel” – an insight that could inspire a number of interesting faith-based responses, ranging from “God most certainly is at the wheel” to “Be the wheel!” to “God gives you the wheel, but the choices are not to turn right or left, only up or down.”
Do all of the passengers get a turn at the wheel?
Today it’s your turn. Floor it.
Scott D. McLean, MD 
