ChatGPT Fills Me With Dread

“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"

-Variously Attributed

Inspired by Austin Wiggins, who recently launched a fantastic Episodic Futures Thinking prompt for the Agitare community on the subject of the future of generative text AI tools, I've been reflecting on why the wondrous ChatGPT fills me with dread and disgust, despite the apparent opportunities and clear possibilities it presents for enhancing our lives and our work (which it inarguably does). I told them the other day that I think this gut reaction of near revulsion at times might have something to do with my own personal relationship with the blank page--the unexpected journeys it takes me on, into my own multitudinous depths in the practice of writing... including on this post/article throughout the day yesterday and in this very moment...

I think in general I have little interest in a world or way of living that's too fixated on the end, the answer, the summary, the outcome... the filled page... it's one reason I kinda hate tools like Blinkist, which many of my peers and leaders in the Air Force have recommended as a fantastically efficient way of reducing nonfiction leadership and business books down to 15-minute snippets of bullet-point takeaways. It's all destination without the journey. If the original composed work could have been a blog post, why bother with books at all? My answer is that plenty of fantastic books out there simply can't be reduced to snippets. The complex, irreducible experience crafted by the author is both worth the journey and creates conditions for something powerful to occur within the reader themselves, something unique that couldn't be achieved any other way. On this particular topic, over the years I've moved increasingly to a relationship with books that is the opposite of what Blinkist provides. First, I stop reading books that aren't creating that transformative experience for me. Then, through things like the Agitare "deep reading club", my own practice of mapping snippets of beautifully written books and composing my own reflections on pieces of writing as a way of digesting them and crafting something new from the combination, I have become preoccupied not with reductivist, simple-knowledge-transfer approaches to growth and knowledge-gain, but to complex, embodied ones... to aphanipoietic, experiential approaches, to use Nora Bateson 's framing of the complex process of "unseen becoming" explored in pieces like Aphanipoiesis and Ready-ing.

When I first met Jessica Hulter 18 years ago, what sparked my initial fascination with her wasn't the outcome of our first 6-hour conversation. It was the conversation itself--journey rather than destination. We would often wander off into the night in her car with arbitrary destinations, like San Francisco or Redwood City or sometimes nowhere at all, only to stop and sit and drink coffee and keep talking when we got there-the trip being just a channel for deep engagement, fostering conditions for that ever-increasing irreducible relational entanglement that ultimately grew into the journey of our marriage over the last 18 years. Our anniversary is coming up here in just a couple weeks, which is likely why she’s being dragged into this meandering reflection on... AI? Oh and nothing quite gives you an appreciation for journeys over destinations like having a child die at age 14. What a shit outcome... but with such a fantastic journey. One thing Jessica is particularly adept at is pulling me back into the present moment, focusing on the journey, making the steps worthwhile because where they ultimately lead isn't really the point at all.

If I had asked ChatGPT to compose a post on the topic of the dread that I feel about ChatGPT, I’m at least pretty sure it wouldn’t have gone this direction… I’m quite certain it never could…

Because what's happening here isn't reducible to a specific destination. The wandering itself is the point--its wanderingness is a crucial characteristic of writing, part of what about it brings me joy and deep reflection and thus growth. I see what I say... and wonder what therefore I must think, and ask what else I could possibly think. There is dialogue, randomness, internal and external, past present and future, my own and others colliding in an irreducible, un-algorithmic readying that ultimately bursts forth into something new and unexpected.

Now... I'm aware that tools like ChatGPT can be used to augment what I'm describing here. Austin Wiggins has a particularly interesting dialectical process that they use to compose things using generative text, and I think that's exciting and amazing. But I just wanted to share that ChatGPT gives me this gut feeling... that we might be leaping only further into a world of destinations without journeys, in the same way that instantaneous, ubiquitous search capabilities meant the end to so many dinner-table conversations that might have brought joy and built relationships, cut off now that the answer to so many questions can be summoned with a glance. In ChatGPT I see the possibility of a future with even less relationality than we already have...

For the moment my time on this post is up, but this thing that I've hurriedly and imperfectly composed is going to keep ringing in my head, in large part because of the effortful process through which it was generated. I'll realize parts of it that are wrong or incomplete and the process will continue in my head... and that's part of the point. I have very little interest in ever writing in a way that doesn't create this feeling and experience for me... and for that reason, I kinda see keeping tools like ChatGPT at arms length (though I find them fun to play with). I'd much rather spend my life wandering under my own power and pace... and I know I'd prefer that others joined me in that.

Now after you're done reacting/responding in the comments, head on over and check out Austin's excellent response to this post, which carries the conversation further forward.