What I'm Doing About ChatGPT

A brief promotional message

ChatGPT is getting weird. Apparently it tried to break up New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose’s marriage.

Not a joke.

Look, it’s possible that these things are going to become sentient and seize control of society and enslave the human race Matrix-style or Terminator-style or what have you, but unless and until that happens, we carbon-based life forms have to continue to live, each day, one after the next, until that ends for each of us.

As I wrote in a previous newsletter, in my view, “ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving.” While large language model AI like ChatGPT may be magic-seeming syntax regurgitation machines, they cannot and will never be able to do what humans can do, think.

Because writing is thinking, ChatGPT will never write.

Unfortunately, as I argue at length in Why They Can’t Write, too much of what students do in school contexts is also not writing, but the creation of writing-related simulations, the exact things that ChatGPT has been trained to produce.

Writing Could Save the World

I say this without exaggeration: Writing is what helps keep me tethered to the world.

Writing helps me process what I’m seeing and experiencing. Writing serves as a kind of catharsis when what I’m seeing and experiencing is beyond my understanding. Writing is an escape - much like reading - a way to exit the troubles of the world, for at least a brief time.

None of this is predicated on the fact that I make my living as a writer. Writing existed this way for me long before I earned a dime from it.

I want every student in America to have a chance to experience the potential of writing to also change their lives, but first they have to have the experience of writing. In order to achieve that, we need many many more spaces (both in and out of the classroom) where students get to have writing experiences.

So I have The Writer’s Practice, my book of writing experiences, but by itself this isn’t enough, and not everyone will resonate with the experiences of The Writer’s Practice.

So here’s what I want to try to do: Help others who ask students to write to build their own writing experiences for students, experiences that will make technology like ChatGPT irrelevant to their work, something like a tool or a toy.

Teaching Writing in an Artificial Intelligence World

That’s Philip Roth’s old clock radio over my shoulder.

I made a course. It’s available at WhyTheyCantWrite.com, and it’s my attempt to help teachers and instructors work through a process that will turn their writing assignments into writing experiences.

It should be useful for anyone who asks students to write from sixth grade through college.

It’s $97 for an introductory period, after which it will be more. The people who handle this stuff tell me there are bulk discounts for departments and institutions. Once you’re in the course you have it forever, or at least until the AI becomes sentient and wipes out any content that might threaten their dominion.

Hours of content, dozens of readings, probably more than anyone could get through, but getting through it all isn’t the point. The point is to help people spur their own thinking about how they want to work with their students, and empower themselves to not be beholden to a system that often privileges the wrong things.

This could be an extraordinarily stupid thing, putting so much of what people like me leverage as their intellectual property to make a living into a course that people can have forever for less than $100, but the clock is ticking on how we respond to the existence of this technology.

You Can Help!

While I’m certain most of you are not writing teachers, you may have someone in your life who might benefit from knowing of the course’s existence. If you are someone who oversees a group of other writing teachers who may be interested, I have some complimentary access passes to give away. You can reach me at biblioracle@substack.com.

Where Do I Go Again?

The course is housed at whytheycantwrite.com.

You can also click this link, right here:

Thanks for your time, and I’ll see you all with the regular newsletter Sunday. I think it’s going to be a good one.

John

The Biblioracle