Only Bad Writers Should Fear ChatGPT

"People seem to think that OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, is going to put many writers out of business or make writing bland -- or both. But perhaps that's not a bad thing.

With the rise of the internet, we're inundated with more writing than ever and most of it is mediocre. On social media platforms like Twitter, everyone gets a license to be a short-form editorial writer, uninhibited by an editor or boss riding them for accuracy and relevance. Are public debates over ideas and policies any more informed or enlightened for having these truncated opinion pieces? You know the answer.

Journalism has the opposite problem. Journalistic writing once had to fit into a set number of column inches. Now, the digital-news hole is infinite, so most news stories go on and on without a sense of restraint -- but with dwindling quality. No wonder ChatGPT's most immediate application is on digital news, tech and social-gossip sites desperate to keep readers engaged with whatever content sticks to the wall.

And look at corporate writing: It's either cliche-ridden, meaningless fluff or rife with jargon. Either way, most of it is utterly forgettable.

Academics aren't much better. Their writing -- especially in the humanities and social sciences -- is so arcane and technical that most of it is never read, even by other academics.

Maybe robots should get a shot at taking over some of this workday prose. Who wouldn't mind a robot-generated statement that clearly articulates a company's strategy without referring to the time-worn cliches of "paradigm shift" or "optimized performance"? What's so bad about an academic paper written in language that any keen learner could understand? Would you turn your nose up at concise, fact-rich reporting on recent news?

I think people fear robot-writers because they do their job well, maybe even better than humans do.

Some will contend that ChatGPT's skills are limited and lacking in style, but so what? Sure, it can't write a masterful piece of prose or a profound novel. But most of what we read isn't that good anyway, even the stuff written by people. As long as artificial intelligence produces instruction manuals that are clear and corporate policies that provide direction, that's good enough for me.

A robot might even manage to summarize important historical events without taking potshots at contemporary political figures. (That is, of course, if ChatGPT manages to fix its left-leaning tilt.) Those would all be welcome improvements.

What about the writers who remain? They'll be able to elevate their craft to higher purposes -- or at the very least create something truly original. Consider how portrait artists responded to the invention of photography. The best ones excelled in impressionism, cubism and other movements of modern art. Art didn't disappear, it simply shifted its gaze.

Whether you want them or not, the robot-writers are coming. Soon we will be able to generate solid writing as easily as we use internet search engines. We'll get practical results that work for practical purposes.

But when something new or weighty needs to be shared, we will turn to human writers who have the gift of conveying the unexpressed thought in words that are original and artful. That's the kind of writing humans should do -- and if that's our destiny, we should embrace it, even if fewer of us do the work.

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Mr. Neusner is a partner at 30 Point Strategies, a communications firm." [1]

1. Only Bad Writers Should Fear ChatGPT
Neusner, Noam.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Feb 2023: A.13.