When I was in high school, I remember learning about sharecropping and the New Deal. Although, “learning” isn’t quite right. What’s more correct is I remember my history teacher talking about sharecropping and the New Deal, but I wasn’t learning much of anything because I wasn’t paying attention. To me, he was just yawning on about another boring historical moment. I was a bad student. A very bad student.
About twenty years and a lot of growing up later, I started writing a historical fiction story about a family struggling to hold on to their farm during the farming crisis of the early 1920s, an event that has been overshadowed and almost entirely forgotten by time, despite that it was what set off the The Great Depression and Dustbowl Era. I’ll spare you the history lesson and only suggest to read up on it if you’re interested, which I did a number of years ago because if I was going to write a story, a fiction story, that took place during a period in our country’s history, I needed to learn everything I could about it to bring it to life, ACCURATELY.
I set off on what ended up being about a three year journey, reading everything I could find on this barely remembered event.
I did the work, put in the research, absorbed the material, and the end product even impressed US Farm Report Broadcaster and foremost agricultural expert Orion Samuelson, who thought everything I wrote was accurate and could have been written by a farmer. In Samuelson’s words, my story was “A very realistic portrayal of how farm families deal with financial setbacks and the emotional impact agricultural crises have on family life.”
I’m telling you this not to stroke my own ego. When it comes to writing, I don’t have one. Years of not “making it” beat the ego out of me a while ago (though not to say I didn’t fight back plenty but time won). Now, when I write, I do so for me and for the craft. I want to simply write an honest-to-goodness good story. So I’m not telling you this to get some likes. I am, however, telling you this because I’m afraid this commitment for storytelling, genuine storytelling, the kind that takes research, hard work, and most importantly heart might be going away with something called ChatGPT.
ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and is an Artificial Intelligence platform that is open to the public and can write about anything.
But it can’t. Not really.
Like all AI, it’s knowledge is artificial. It’s completely dependent on a massive database of information (in this case the Internet) to consult, which some AI developers would argue is what humans do: draw from what is already known and then apply as their own knowledge. So what’s really the difference?
But I’m not trying to pit human intelligence against artificial intelligence in this editorial. That war is probably going to be waged for hundreds of years to come. What concerns me about ChatGPT is what it’s going to rob from us, especially our youth.
Across the country, school districts are banning ChatGPT from use in their systems because students can use it to write essays by just saying into their phones, “Write an essay on sharecropping.” A few seconds later, up pops an “original” essay on sharecropping the student can copy and paste and hand in as their own without the teacher being the wiser (though there are some developers producing apps that can detect if AI was used in a piece of writing). But I don’t even care that kids are using AI to cheat in class. What I care about is that kids, and adults alike, are cheating themselves when they use AI as anything other than a research tool. They’re missing out on building that ever-important formula: research, absorb, apply, advance. They’re missing out on learning to communicate.
I’m all for making things easier. I’ve said it before, I’m very happy I own and run a newspaper today opposed to a hundred years ago. Because of computers and design software, the job is a lot easier than what it used to be. I don’t think kids today should have to research topics the way I had to: go to the library, run my fingers through a card catalog, crack open a book, and take notes with a pencil. Those days are long gone. And it appears that “googling” something may soon be long gone with AI and ChatGPT.
What worries me is that ChatGPT and others like it will reduce our communication skills to copy and paste, if kids aren’t taught to use it as a tool and tool only, a starting point, if you will, to fact checking and additional research.
This is especially important because the Internet is loaded with bad and inaccurate information. I’m willing to bet that there’s more bad info out there than good, but ChatGPT can’t differentiate between the two.
To prove my point, I installed an AI writing app on my phone (it wasn’t ChatGPT because their site had crashed from so many downloads but one like it that used the same AI tech) and asked it some questions, starting with “Who is Chris La Pelusa?” Here’s its answer:
Chris La Pelusa is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from New York City. He is best known for his work with the band The National, as well as his solo work.
Yeah, that’s NOT me. Interested, I Googled this Chris La Pelusa and couldn’t find a thing on him.
I then asked it to tell me about My Sun Day News. Here’s its answer:
My Sun Day News is a weekly newspaper based in Huntley, Illinois. It covers local news, sports, and events in the Huntley area. It also features columns from local writers and opinion pieces from community members. My Sun Day News is published every Sunday and is available both in print and online.
This is moderately better information but it’s not entirely accurate. We’re not a weekly newspaper that publishes every Sunday. I can also recognize what I wrote from various descriptions of My Sun Day News that could be found online. Technically, it plagiarized me.
I then wanted to see how it would handle local news, knowing it would fail miserably because one thing none of these AI writers can do is keep track of real-time info. It takes their bots a while to scour the Internet for info, making it better for historical retrieval than current affairs. But I asked it anyway to tell me about Dairy Mart in Huntley because there’s a lot of unfortunate news surrounding its new owners at the moment, so I wanted to see if it would detect that. Here’s what it told me:
Dairy Mart in Huntley, Illinois is a family-owned convenience store that has been serving the local community for over 30 years. Located in the heart of Huntley, the store offers a wide variety of products and services, including a full-service deli, a wide selection of grocery items, and a variety of convenience items.
The store is known for its friendly and helpful staff, who are always willing to help customers find what they need. The store also offers a variety of services, such as a car wash, a gas station, and a drive-thru window. Customers can also take advantage of the store’s weekly specials, which include discounts on select items.
The store also offers a variety of fresh produce, including fruits, vegetables, and dairy products. Customers can also find a variety of snacks, including chips, candy, and ice cream. The store also offers a variety of beverages, including soda, juice, and coffee.
Dairy Mart in Huntley is a great place to shop for all of your convenience needs. The store offers a wide selection of products and services, and the staff is always friendly and helpful. Whether you’re looking for groceries, snacks, or a car wash, Dairy Mart in Huntley has you covered.
This isn’t even remotely accurate. Furthermore, it didn’t offer any of the current news about Dairy Mart. Though my next question “Is AI good for local reporting?” got it to admit:
“No, AI is not good at reporting local news. AI is better suited for tasks such as data analysis, natural language processing, and image recognition.”
Lastly, thinking about that long-ago history lesson on sharecropping and the New Deal and my later education of same, I asked it to write me a brief fiction story about sharecropping. Here’s what it came up with:
John had been a sharecropper for as long as he could remember. He worked hard every day, tending to the land and harvesting the crops. Despite his hard work, he never seemed to get ahead. He was always in debt to the landowner, and his family was struggling to make ends meet.
One day, John had an idea. He decided to start a small business selling the crops he harvested. With the money he made, he was able to pay off his debts and provide for his family. He was finally able to break free from the cycle of sharecropping and build a better life for himself and his family.
Okay, this is bad writing. Mostly, it’s breaking the number-one rule of storytelling: show don’t tell. This is all telling and, like kids like to say today, so very basic. Mostly, it lacks heart and kills human creativity.
Coincidentally, John is the name I gave the main character in my story, for the fun of it, let’s compare a brief scene I wrote where a neighbor of John’s is talking about the farming crisis:
Charles Clifford, in his vest and spectacles over doggish eyes, looked more accountant than farmer on this Saturday afternoon. He was tired and worn out and put his back against John’s tractor, using alarming words like “spread thin” and “foreclosure” and “Warren Harding.” John had heard the words before. But to hear them spoken on his land, within earshot of his children and his wife, put a chill in his bones. Charles continued, quoting headlines and reeling out news stories.
“It’s crazy, John. Half the farmers are planting more crops to make up for the low grain prices, while the other half are planting less. Maybe I should have planted wheat this year, I don’t know. Just the other day, I saw Hew Parker plowing over a field of corn. He sank fifty acres right into the ground. I thought he went mad until he told me the AAA was paying him not to plant corn. And I heard they’re slaughtering piglets by the thousands in Iowa to the same end. The whole lot of us don’t know which way the other’s going. And that’s a problem. We need to organize.”
Not to toot my own horn, but I’m sure you see the difference between real writing and the aforementioned. Real writing has heart, has a beat, and an intelligence all to itself.
