Bots are coming: What next for writers?

There’s a lot of buzz going around this week about ChatBot, an artificial intelligence tool that is available to all who want to beta test it right now.?You just have to log in, prove you are a human, and start chatting.?Put your question in a window, and see what comes back.

A Writer Meets Chatbot

Some of the concern about Chatbot is from writers who fear they are about to be replaced by machines that can manage grammar and spelling better than they can, and perhaps frame ideas much quicker than they can.?To understand how much I need to be worried about being replaced, I decided to try chatbot out with this request, ?

Me:?“Tell me how chatbot will change writing.”

Chatbot: "Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. They can be used to answer questions, provide customer service, or even just to have a casual conversation with users. In terms of how chatbots may change writing, there are a few potential ways this could happen:

1.????Chatbots may encourage a more concise and to-the-point style of writing, as they are designed to provide quick and accurate responses to user inquiries. This could lead to a shift away from more traditional, lengthy writing styles.

2.????Chatbots may also change the way that people interact with written content, as users may become more accustomed to receiving information in a conversational format. This could lead to a greater emphasis on dialogue and conversation in writing.

3.????Chatbots may also impact the way that businesses and organizations communicate with their customers or clients. For example, chatbots could be used to handle frequently asked questions or to provide information about products and services in a more personalized and efficient way.

Overall, chatbots may change writing by promoting a more efficient and interactive style of communication. However, it's important to note that chatbots are not a replacement for human writers, and the role of traditional writing will likely continue to be important in many contexts."

?That’s an artificial intelligence point of view.?

What’s a Human Point of View?

First, there are very few people who like writing for itself.?For most of the people I work with, writing is a means to an end, often a somewhat painful means.?We know we have something to say, but all sorts of inner voices tell us we can’t really do it.?

What if the process for creating a first draft becomes explaining an idea to a bot and asking it to put the idea in clear words??

A lot of writing is every day stuff that we humans express indirectly or ambiguously.?It may be that we can send each other clearer notes with a chatbot as an intermediary.

Perhaps as the chatbot above suggests, it could help us write more concisely and to the point.?For example, I made this follow-on request:

Me:?"Could you say this in fewer words?"

Chatbot: "Chatbots are computer programs that simulate conversation with humans and can be used for customer service, answering questions, and having casual conversations. They may change writing by encouraging concise and efficient communication, promoting a conversational style, and impacting the way businesses communicate with customers. However, they are not a replacement for human writers."

But there may be limits.

Me:?"Could you add a story to that?"

Chatbot: "An error occurred. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com."

I don’t know whether I had delayed too long or if it just didn’t like being asked for a story. I asked twice, very politely, with the same results.

An Analogy

As I thought over chatbots and writing, I remembered another machine transformation that occurred over my lifetime.?When my grandmother was young, she made her own clothes, first with needle and thread and then with a treadle sewing machine.?We always had an electric sewing machine.?In the required home economics course in junior high school, I learned how to make my own clothes:?laying patterns on fabric lined up carefully with the grain, cutting out the pieces, and then putting them together.??I still have my sewing machine, which mostly comes in handy for mending.??Knowing the anatomy of clothes helps a lot with mending effectively.

My daughter doesn’t even know how to use a sewing machine, probably is less adept at mending, and has never made her own clothes.?

But my daughter has embarked on custom dress making. As a gift one year, she sent me to a website where I chose a style, selected a fabric, and entered my measurements.?The dress arrived in the mail a week or so later.

Will there be a similar evolution in which the tedium of writing is replaced by machines just as the tedium of hand sewing was replaced by sewing machines and then online programs?

?An Experiment Using a ChatBot to Write on a Serious Topic

One of the people in my writers’ workshops conducted an experiment last week.?He asked the chatbot, “How should we prepare for the death of someone close to us?”?When he got his first results, he made some follow-up requests, such as “Please make it more emotional.”?

Then he submitted his piece to the writers’ group, openly identifying it as something he had cobbled together out of paragraphs produced by a chatbot.?

My response was mixed.?The piece felt rather flat and impersonal.?It didn’t have the writer’s personality in it, and there were no stories.?The central concept in the piece was that we practice for a loss the way a pilot practices in a flight simulator. I thought I could make better suggestions for someone for with a family death imminent. ??

But there were no grammatical twinkies, other than some pronoun inconsistencies, such as switching from you to we in mid paragraph.

What comes next?

Perhaps writing in a world of chatbots will be like getting dressed for an occasion.?We don’t create our clothes from scratch.?But we do go to the closet with an idea of how we want to look and why.?We select from the options there, perhaps combining them in new ways as we think about the people we’ll see and how we want to appear.

If we choose to write with chatbots, I expect we will still need to select our own ideas to expound.?Perhaps we will give the machine very rough drafts and ask it to fill out certain sections.?Perhaps we will give it later drafts to edit for spelling, wording, grammar, concision, and even style.?

I guess I’m suggesting that we approach the world of chatbots writing with a spirit of flexibility, remembering what we want to accomplish with writing, and not letting our egos be unduly daunted that chatbots can do some of the steps better than we can.

My sewing machine sews a stronger seam than I do by hand.

In the meantime, if you want to get better at the human side of writing, I can't think of a better way than trying out the experiments in Sit Write Share. There is still work for humans to do capturing their ideas and experience.