CHAT GPT: WRITERS’ ALLY OR ADVERSARY?

The whole world and its great grandaunt is agog with excitement at the arrival of the new wonder kid on the block, Chat GPT.

So what is Chat GPT?

For those who are yet to try it, Chat GPT is the latest text generation model from Open AI. As of now, a ‘Free Research Preview’ is available to anyone – at Open AI’s discretion. You can sign in with your email account and the home screen will give you examples, capabilities, and limitations. Click Try It and you are ready to go – in seconds, based on the prompts you key in, you can get the plot for your next novel, a scene/dialogue – whatever.
Is it really that magical? Will Chat GPT prove to be a writer’s ally or adversary?
Because Chat GPT relies wholly on what it has seen before, it is best suited for tasks where information requested is already curated and can be sorted out based on a few parameters – code generation, education, healthcare, social media (jokes, short poems, tweets).
The same capability tasked with creative writing, specially fiction, proves a major drawback. Because Chat GPT’s learning can only be from books and the Internet, it’s output would forever remain only as good as its data-scientists’ literary knowledge.
Yes it can generate plotlines, scenes, dialogues in PG Wodehouse, Mills and Boon, Agatha Christie style – whatever you choose – but not in your style.A creative writer could, however, turn Chat GPT into an ally by using it as an interactive tool; picking up ideas, gleaning a plot turn here and there; experimenting by asking Chat GPT to generate different responses. Incidentally when asked to generate romance/thriller plotlines within an Indian setting, chances are Chat GPT will still throw up a Maharaja and a princess or two (LoL).

It certainly cannot think out of the box, make that leap of faith into the unknown where creativity resides. So there is no way – as yet – that it is going to replace a Murakami, a Rushdie, a Vinod Kumar Shukla or a Geetanjali Shree, but… Make no mistake, Chat GPT is going to disrupt the content creation industry as nothing before.

Experts are predicting a scenario where Chat GPT is no longer free. The Big Five of the publishing industry will purchase its expensive plans, hire a posse of ‘creative’ writers (outsourced to the developing world – India?) to feed in prompts to Chat GPT, and produce conveyor belt genre manuscripts for mass market airport paperbacks. By the time Chat GPT becomes affordable for Indie writers, the Big Five would have laughed all the way home.

The social media would be inundated with ‘amazing’, ‘awesome’ Chat GPT outputs and even the most creative writers would be hard pressed to keep up with social media ‘stars’; even the most courageous indie writers would find it daunting to compete for a readership that would, by then, have been sufficiently dumbed down by mass produced boilerplate content.
If you’re a creative spirit, still dreaming of becoming a writer, make Chat GPT your ally before it becomes your adversary. Tighten your belt, hold on to your seat because there’s a whole new world of readers and writers looming in the horizon.