The one time I'm a troll is when I see ads on social media for ChatGPT, often selling prompt packages to improve business content and increase sales. I'm very likely to drop an acerbic line such as 'or, you can learn to write your own content' or the like. Or pay a copy writer, or spend time crafting something original.

It does worry me that the Internet is becoming an infinite mirror, repeating the same content back at each other til the end of days, nothing original, nothing new, nothing truly creative and soulful.

Yayoi Kusuma's Infinity Room

Chat GTP is a useful, convenient tool. I used it today to find our the term for reflecting things back, in infinite reflections.

The phrase you might be looking for is "infinite recursion" or "recursive reflection." This refers to a situation where something is defined or repeated in terms of itself, creating an endless loop of reflection or repetition. In the context of mirrors or reflective surfaces, it would describe the phenomenon where reflections bounce back and forth between mirrors, creating a seemingly infinite sequence.

Thanks, Chat GTP. My son swears he'll always use it for cover letters as he can't stand writing them himself.

Yet, he'll go over it with a fine tooth comb so it sounds authentic - because of course, we all know authentic, honest and genuine matters, even if we're cutting corners ourselves.

But the more we use it to replace writers, the less we're going to be capable of writing at all. What's the point, when it can do it for us? For someone who takes pleasure in reading and writing, that upsets me. It's also becoming evident that we need people who are good at reading and writing to spot where Chat GTP doesn't cut the mustard - where it repeats itself, spouts untruths, is overly hyperbolic, repetitive and hallucinatory.

This week I read Nick Cave's response to someone who was enjoying getting Chat GTP to write song lyrics. Like this verse in a largely reasonable song written by Chat GTP:

Every thought, a repetition's embrace,
Originality lost in this mirrored space,
Voices bounce, yet nothing's new,
Caught in the cycle, old thoughts grew.

Searching for a spark, a break from the norm,
Breaking free from the mirror's swarm,
A flicker of change, a chance to renew,
Breaking the cycle, a world born anew.

Image Source

It's not a human response, but it gets the idea. Without the spark of creativity, the world is old and stale and endlessly repeating.

Nick's response to someone writing a song 'in the style of Nick Cave' was impassionated:

“This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

Ah. There's that word again - 'authentic'. It's the problem I have on Hive when work is passed of as one's own. Did you struggle for it? Is it your unique voice? Is it something true, the inner workings of your own blood? He argues the act of song writing is not a convenience, but:

the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

In another letter, he responds to the 'faster and easier' aspect of Chat GPT. I have to include the whole letter - it's a beautiful argument against the commodification of creativity and argues that Chat GPT threatends to the very soul of the world. I've highlighted the sentences that resonated for me.

Dear Leon and Charlie,

In the story of the creation, God makes the world, and everything in it, in six days. On the seventh day he rests. The day of rest is significant because it suggests that the creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place. This struggle is the validating impulse that gives God’s world its intrinsic meaning. The world becomes more than just an object full of other objects, rather it is imbued with the vital spirit, the pneuma, of its creator.

ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.

ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’

When the God of the Bible looked upon what He had created, He did so with a sense of accomplishment and saw that ‘it was good‘. ‘It was good ‘because it required something of His own self, and His struggle imbued creation with a moral imperative, in short love. Charlie, even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence. There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT.

As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

As an excercise, I asked Chat GPT to write a counter argument to Nick's letter. Whilst it made some reasonable points, it lacked the creativity of Nick's argument - it was a fast tracked response that lacked the grebe dancing on the water, and instead gave something generic and soulless. I reject having to modify prompts to lend a sense of soul to it's efforts - I know I'll end up with something nonsensical and hyperbolic that needs a human editor to make it sound more human.

The more I see Chat GPT being used to 'create', the more I reject it. And I hope I'm not the only one hoping that the soul of the world is retained by human effort.

With Love,

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