This is the equivalent to standing on a treeless plain and shouting Stop! to a storm that fills all of the horizon and is coming my way.
Once more the tech edge lords have given us a tool that will make our lives easier and render us more half-witted than we have already become.
I’m seeing more articles from literate individuals who someone taught how to write proclaiming the liberation from writing, from grading, from the difficult task of teaching others how to write.
Nothing will stop this storm, I know. Technology has its own cancerous identity and power, but I will shout anyway.
One never finishes learning how to write. You just keep at it. Teaching others how to do so is very difficult, labor intensive, frustrating and imperfect. It is also essential.
Writing shows the writer how to think and also what he or she is actually thinking. It is both process and revelation.
You have messes inside your heads — anarchic, disordered atoms of thoughts, evanescent webs, mists. Writing, in forcing one to make that anarchy tangible in the form of marks on a page that another person must be able to understand, creates order. Through the force applied by concentration, sentence by sentence, coherence can emerge. Disorder can be beaten back for another day. Clarity can be achieved.
Within the process of creation, revelation occurs. These qualities are as intertwined as neutrons and protons in the structure of an atom. Writing prompts the formation of ideas and of narratives. Associations lead to other associations which lead to conclusions which lead to questions which lead to other questions which lead to answers which call forth other associations and further questions and all of this is marvelous. This is thinking. This is glorious.
Asking a computer-generated ‘entity’ to do this for one is a betrayal of an integrity of thought and identity which almost all of us have been granted. It is lazy. It is a sin. It is self-destructive.
Not one word of anything I have written on this site or will ever write on this site or anywhere else is assisted or created by ChatGPT. Good or bad, it is mine and does not belong to a machine.
In writing this, a part of me feels like the oldest man alive, the white-haired goober walking down the road, head down, muttering, throwing off wild gestures.
So let this old man come to a stop and look at you behind your monitor and say No! Let me offer a pep talk that will probably convince no one. Do it yourself. Struggle. Take on the burden. Learn how to write using your own brain and heart. Please, do it for yourself and for your own capacity and potential for thinking and discovery.
