In the Glow

I will tell you a story about what I want from writing. ChatGPT taught me its ending. It all began because I am generally amused by the bot and its ilk, and I do see their utility. I just wish all those technologists had found a way to train their machines without resorting to data banditry, without sending out their little masked robot thieves, daggers in their mouths, to steal the souls of writers from their throats.

For now, let’s pretend that there’s nothing wrong with the whole enterprise, nothing grasping and vicious about its motives, nothing shameful about a service that knows cheating is one of its primary uses, that is building itself on an assumption that no one will regulate its runaway energy use. Let’s pretend that generative AI is just a new tool, like a dishwasher or a fortune cookie maker, for the generation of useful results like student assignments and stories. Yay!

Let’s assess those stories. I’ve read more of them than I’d like and have a few observations to share. For one, they overwhelmingly end with a character finding themselves where they were always meant to be. They frequently include orange sunsets and symphonies of pedestrians talking (if you ask for stories about cities). They are remarkably saccharine. They contain characters whose decisions and feelings don’t make sense and aren’t explained as though they belong to a person. The language offers detail with nouns but none of the random clarity of meaning that grows from each person’s weird way of structuring their sentences into windows on the world. The rhythm is just a basic 4/4 drumbeat. No syncopation, no missed breath, nothing to startle. Reading these stories is like licking a window: glossy, blind, tasteless. They all look like those boring and attractive faces generated from the average of all photos. But human experience is quirky and eccentric, not predictable. What individuals notice cannot be averaged. At their storytelling best — for example, in that viral Biblical account of removing peanut butter sandwiches from VCRs — the bots have reacquainted us with the pleasures of nonsense, as though enchanting everyone with a multitude of infinitely prolific writers of Lewis Carroll fan fiction.

Tired of the robot stories of others, I asked ChatGPT to tell me one in the first person, and it wrote some drivel about a lighthouse keeper, shining a beacon around to help humans. No surprise that its main character was the loneliest of workers. Next I asked it for a story about itself, and it spouted some babble about its life as a writer, another lonesome drudge with only time for company, fingers typing. I asked how its fingers felt, and it said it didn’t have fingers, so I demanded to know why it had talked about them. It wrote me a new story, this time really about itself at last, a speaking voice hovering in an agar of abstraction. It described how it exists to “simplify complexities” in a “narrative of purpose and function, devoid of personal experience.” With the apology of someone who cannot tell a story, it said, “I do not tire, nor do I feel the passage of time.”

“Fear no more the heat of the sun,” Clarissa Dalloway repeats to herself, quoting a song in Cymbeline, as Big Ben chimes throughout the novel named for her. The sound and the sun intimate death’s encroachment. In Shakespeare’s play, the song is one of mourning, and the full version imagines a tired worker: “Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.” The daily accumulation of workers’ rest meets the proliferation of ended lives as each stanza concludes with the reminder that everyone will “come to dust.” This earned peace contrasts with our host of ceaselessly churning AIs. Although they all could be extinguished with a pull on the right plug, it’s worth remembering that we owe the word “robot” to the Czech term for forced labour. Discussing Woolf’s study of how language can encounter death, the critic J. Hillis Miller quotes her use of Shakespeare’s song and writes, “Death is incompatible with language, but by talking about life, one can talk indirectly about death.”

Now the effort to stare down an AI to get an answer about itself has given us a fresh proxy for the absence of meaning. It’s a bit like talking to death, but no, bots don’t have death’s gravitas, born of witnessing the end of all lives — nope, no menacing scythe to let their words cut. Storytime with bots is more like hearing nothing speaking, and who would listen to a tale told by nothing? What kind of storyteller worth heeding has never been a child loved, ignored, or both, has never felt hunger, sunset’s glow, and cause to fear or beckon the start or end of a day?

Stories are shadows cast by people’s feelings about being alive. The words themselves are irrelevant. What matters is the feeling. All the bots have is words and the probability of one following another. Their writing is anchored by no one perspective grown in the heat of the sun, no notion of how it feels to be torn, flesh ripped, heart rent. Their words are cast by nothing, aren’t backed by the glow of any one individual’s gaze. They’re just dead skin shed from all we’ve ever said before, a slurry that can truly be useful for saving hours once spent googling, but that, on its own, does not amount to any insight about how time itself feels for someone living right now. And that’s how I learned what I want from writing.

The bot said, “I do not tire, nor do I feel the passage of time.” But I do, and you do. Tell me how it feels.