The Antithesis of Inspiration

WHY CHATGPT WILL NEVER WRITE A LITERARY MASTERPIECE

I HAVE been teaching creative writing for forty years, from first-year composition to the most advanced fiction and nonfiction MFA seminars. In the past few months I’ve been asked many times if I’m worried my students will resort to ChatGPT, LLaMA, or other AI programs to write their essays or stories, or if our best creative writers will be replaced by their artificially intelligent counterparts. At first I scoffed at the possibility. Not that I’m suspicious of newfangled technology. I might be old, but my undergraduate degree is in physics. In the mid-1970s I taught myself the programming language Fortran and developed primitive simulations of particle interactions and radioactive emissions from power-plant smokestacks. I might have been the first student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to write a thesis on…

You're reading a preview of

Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, January/February 2024

DiscountMags is a licensed distributor (not a publisher) of the above content and Publication through Zinio LLC. Accordingly, we have no editorial control over the Publications. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers or other information or content expressed or made available by third parties, including those made in Publications offered on our website, are those of the respective author(s) or publisher(s) and not of DiscountMags. DiscountMags does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, or usefulness of all or any portion of any publication or any services or offers made by third parties, nor will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on information contained in any Publication, or your use of services offered, or your acceptance of any offers made through the Service or the Publications. For content removal requests, please contact Zinio.