Why be a Hedgehog when you can be a Cheetah?

Is AI good for writers?

I seem to have writer’s block. My mind isn’t grabbing hold of the ideas that drift by, and when I do grab one and sink my pen into it, the result excites me about as much as the time my auntie bought me socks for Christmas when I was ten.

I wonder if I’m being intimidated by ChatGPT. Have you heard of it? I’ve been playing around with this new-fangled AI contraption. You can type a few prompts into its massive computerized brain, and it will spit out paragraphs in seconds of such quality that I feel like a hedgehog racing against a cheetah. I’m never going to win. It already has all my great ideas and millions more besides in its massive brain. Knowledge, art, humour, nuance, irony, metaphor, wisdom, it’s all there like water in a faucet. I just have to turn the tap with a few prompts, and it all gushes out in milliseconds — Talk about depressing!

But maybe there is another way to look at it. Maybe I’ve just acquired a full staff of writing assistants and editors for nothing. A privilege formerly reserved only for rich elites. Maybe ChatGPT is my friend, maybe it is the great leveller for the common man. Maybe now, I, the lowly building manager who wants to write with the big boys, but doesn’t have the time or resources, can actually compete!

I think I’ve managed to escape my writer’s block! I just wrote my way through it. It feels so good, I’m thinking, I’m working through ideas, I’m wrestling with word choices, the old neurons are firing, and my writing has got me fired up again. I’ve had a mental workout, I feel tired but good.

Oh dear, I’ve just had another potentially terrible thought. If I have writer’s block again, I could just type a few prompts into ChatGPT and voila, there is a story, an article, a poem, whatever I want, and I’m sure I’ll like it, and you will too. I will never have writer’s block again! But is this good news? Or am I just being lazy? Is the use of ChatGPT the end of brain workouts for writers? Is this where we are headed? We let calculators and computers do all the heavy lifting in math for us. No scientist regrets the help. Is ChatGBT basically the same for writers? Scientists are better at what they do because of their tools, and we still need scientists. Will writers just be better at what they do, thanks to AI? Surely, AI won’t replace writers.

This brings me back to a core question that requires an answer. Why do I write? If writing is merely a tool to me. A way to make money or get famous, then I will use whatever tools are available, but if I write purely (or at least mostly) for the love of writing — for the actual experience of it — then I will keep working my way through writer's block, I will keep swearing at an empty page, crumpled up pieces of paper will still fly across the room. My eyes will continue to search heavenward, looking for inspiration. Anguish, frustration, wrestling and labour pains will have to be endured, but so too, eventually, a birth that fills me with joy. I will lovingly cradle in my arms this newborn arrangement of letters that I have miraculously turned into meaning. I will raise this gift to the world like Rafiki does to Simba in The Lion King, and whether the creation lives or dies will be up to you. But for me, the joy has already come. This is why I write.