Masterpiece Moore’s text and makes me think of Flaubert when he mentioned “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” in a trial for immorality. Why do I think this? Simply because of the power that literature and words have to transform and contain the most intimate aspects of the writer, something that cannot be replaced by any machine. Moore reveals the sensitivity of human beings when she says, “Where does dust come from? Or: Why is there war? Or: If there’s a God, then why is my brother now a cripple?” because they are thoughts that human beings have had at some point in their lives, just like something banal like “Let’s go out and get a big beer.” These are simple acts or words, but they contain a personal, social, and cultural background.
I have mentioned this many times, but a machine or AI cannot take away from human beings the capacity to feel, to express, to tell. When that happens, the world will end. I remember a long time ago, a professor told me that all literature has already been told, already been said, already been written, whether it was in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, or the Odyssey, that all genres were already there, all themes were already addressed. So when I read about Originality and Voice, I think that yes, everything has already been told, but the way it is told is different, the way in which the world is narrated through the eyes of each writer is different, everything has already been told, but there are different ways of reading it. What would the world be like without the poems of Benedetti or Neruda? What would Magical Realism be without Gabo? What would the damned be without Baudelaire? The genres and stories are there, but those who tell them make them unique.
Upon the topic of authorship, before reading any of the articles, I immediately thought of two Bible passages (shocker, I know). The first was Genesis 1, the creation story. Everything was created by God’s Word– the very Word that, as John explains in John 1:1-14, came down as the light that shines in the darkness. And as I’m writing this, another verse came to mind: 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)– “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” There’s this divine authorship about the entirety of creation, about the Bible itself (given its 40 authors across 3 continents and about 1500 years and still having a consistent and cohesive storyline)… and we were made to reflect that. Genesis 1:26 says “Let us make man in our image, to be like us…” There’s an interesting Latin term that roots from that verse: imago dei. Here’s the thing with that term though: yes, it can translate to “in His image,” but it can also translate to “doing as He would do.” And this is where authorship comes from for us as people– it’s part of the very core of our identities, whether we recognize that identity or not.
“The voice in a piece of writing is a defining characteristic that touches the reader instinctively” (Carlow U). Just this quote had me thinking of how pertinent word choice can be. For example, I asked ChatGPT to describe a heavily infected wound in one sentence and regenerated the results six times. These were the AI generated responses:
A heavily infected wound may be red, swollen, painful, and exude pus.
A heavily infected wound may present with increased pain, redness, swelling, pus, and a foul odor.
A heavily infected wound is characterized by increased pain, redness, swelling, and pus or drainage.
A heavily infected wound may present with increased pain, redness, swelling, and pus discharge.
A heavily infected wound can appear swollen, red, painful, and may discharge pus.
A heavily infected wound is characterized by increased pain, redness, swelling, and drainage of pus.
You can see the pattern, and while it may provide a picture, it may not be pungent or repulsive as a heavily infected wound might be. You don’t feel the radiating heat of the wound just before you touch it by these descriptions. You might see a still picture of the puss excretion, but you can’t quite visualize or smell the volcano-like eruption of sticky, yellow, pungent, rancid goo as some small but excruciating degree of pressure is applied near the edges of the now tomato-colored skin.
My point is, AI may give a still picture, but it does not give life to the picture. Sure, the image I used is not the ideal picture of life, but it is a part of life on this side of eternity nonetheless. And while every life is lived and experienced differently, almost every life here on earth comes physically from different parents, there’s still a pattern that shows life does not come from anything else but life.
Every life also has a trace of its original source. Justin, the author of the Gold Penguin article, starts with this question of what originality really is, which I really appreciated given one of my recent posts that also explored this topic. To sum up the idea of that whole post, here’s just a portion of it:
The key word that make me think of an article we read last Wednesday was original. In this article, Kenneth Goldsmith poses the argument that “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” Goldsmith mentions the ideas of other minds such as Marjorie Perloff and her idea of the unoriginal genius. Essentially, Goldsmith implicitly asks his audience what we should really consider plagiarism, especially given there are authors that have created pieces of other authors’ works– works of unoriginal genius known as patchwriting. So as I skimmed through the articles for this week, I also thought of ChatGPT is basically just an algorithm that does this patchwriting for us.
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So what really is original? I’d argue that there really isn’t anything under the sun that’s truly original. I would have somewhat argued otherwise before reading this article, but there is so much information out and available these days that something truly original is hard to come by. I might even say it’s impossible, even from a faith standpoint.
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The devil isn’t creative– he has no power to create but is only out to steal, kill, and destroy. Rather, he’s crafty. He takes Truth and twists it in such a way that we see our own truths being created. He’s an unoriginal genius, of sorts.
But regardless of how these stories, words, things, ideas, you name it are twisted or molded, they all reflect the same Creator. All things were created for good, they’ve just been used with ill will– thus these things have been left with traces of creators that we see in the every day life of the physical world: people. And that’s not to say we as people always mean the worst when we create– we typically don’t, I know, and that’s because we still do bear the image of a good God, whether we recognize that God and accept our identity in Him or not.
So with that said, Originality, the program Justin writes about, will likely still detect things as “unoriginal” even if it is truly original to the author and no AI tool and no plagiarism is involved. Sure, language is constantly evolving, but there are only so many letters in the alphabet, and only so many different words we can reasonably create aside from the many (but still limited) catalog of English vocabulary. The same is also true of any other language, including computer code.
And this got me into a deeper question that I think I’ll leave us with for today: where does authorship begin? I know I already have my own (probably pretty predictable by now) answer to this question, but it is nonetheless an interesting topic of conversation that I’m sure we’ll get into for next class.
This was an interesting bunch of articles to read. The first thing I want to talk about is Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?’. This article was amazing to read. It fully shows a story of struggle in personal desires. What leads someone to want to write? Most people probably remember wanting to write since the age of 10 or something. I know I have.
The reason why I am talking about this article specifically is because it’s the one that stood out to me the most. This one tells a engaging story from someone’s life. I feel like I can connect to this article compared to the others. Lorrie’s story strongly resonates with me because I have also been in similar situations regarding my career path changes. Although I have never changed from a different major to creative writing, I have been given random recommendations for other career choices, and I have found myself discouraged in my classes. Just like Lorrie, I have also had to endure the same disappointed criticisms every single time I presented my works in class.
It also says a lot when she explains how her multiple dates at the end all say and do the same thing when she tells them about her writing journey. It’s just like when I tell people that I plan on becoming a writer. It feels like I when get asked the same exact questions and I only have the same exact answers to give.
“Whether it is through a news article, company blog post or creative storytelling, writing expresses a voice.”
When writing anything of any sort, it is important to write with a voice. Many times the voice isn’t found until all the writing is complete. As stated in the article a voice is set by the choice of words and the writing structure. Having a voice in your writing sets you apart from other writers. Every writer has a different style which creates the voice for the reader.
Even as the reader, it is nice while reading to be able to establish the voice of the writer. Over the last few months I read about four different books and in each book the writer had their own voice. I was able to distinguish between the different writers because their choice of words were different and how it was written was different as well.
When ChatGPT comes into play, I feel that will cause a writer not to have their own voice. Of course you are able to go back and make changes as much as possible, but for those who will rely on ChatGPT to be their writer will not have their own voice in their writing. I feel that kind of sucks because having a voice with your writing in my opinion makes the writing more interesting and in most cases leave the reader wanting more. It take away the authenticity of the writing. Like I state during my presentation, I like ChatGPT as a tool to help writers get started if that’s a struggle for them but not as a source to use to completely write for them. AI doesn’t have the human voice, so if writers choose to use it as a tool to help them then writers should edit to display their own voice.
Throughout my entire life, and the remainder of his, hardly any words were exchanged between my grandfather and I that either of us mutually understood. I know how to say “I love you Grandpa,” Grandpa is my number one friend,” “good night Grandpa,” “good day Grandpa,” and “bye Grandpa” in Portuguese. I think.
I’m uncertain if I’ve expelled that information to those in this course – I likely have – but those who do know that our connection extended well-beyond words. Communication at least, to me, has never been limited to such.
Most of the time we communicated through … WRESTLING (which I’m pretty sure was taxing for him, I mean, he’s 70 years my senior)! Every day I’d greet him with an improvisational brawl that would often start with a sprint from me and a stiff shot (that never actually connected, old man had precision) from him that would somehow send me flying and rolling backwards into the next room.
Regardless of my having a stellar to dweller day, he knew, and knew based on how I’d basically assault him daily. If my attack was phoned in, he knew that my day was off, and likely for a), b), c), or d) reason. He just … KNEW! On a good day, he’d look at me with a huge smile knowing full well that he was in for a big more effort, and then a look of terror as I’d jump an entire room’s length to attack!
Especially as I got older, I mean, as a kid and even teenager it was kinda cute, but once I started getting into the 20’s his eyes would bulge out in a way that yelled “fodas he’s really about to break my hip!!!”
I promise, the older I got the softer the landing was.
What I’m getting at here in an AI tie-in sorta way I’m not certain, maybe Dr. Z will interpret it in a course-specific way. My goal is to share (a glimpse of) a special connection I had with someone that was as exclusive of words as it is a big part of my heart.
As this week is Jennise and I’s pathfinding week, I would like to define my intentions for our lesson or maybe define what my intentions are not. Jennise and I planned our pathfinding presentation to be a student-focused discussion in which the class is guided to the same conclusions Jennise and I came to. My intention is not to discuss a google or Merriam-Webster definition of meaning. Instead, I aim for the class to find meaning in writing by demonstrating the vast distinctions between human writing and AI writing.
By emphasizing interaction and self-discovery rather than implicit definitions (showing rather than telling), Jennise and I hope to create an impact on our peers perception of meaning in writing and to highlight the strengths of weaknesses of AI writing.
Not only will we create a ‘rubric’ of how we define meaning as a class, but we will then scale AI-generated and human-written poems based on how meaning we believe they hold on a tier list.
My hopes are that this guided conversation does a good job of creating a deeper understanding of why AI writing is incapable of creating meaningful writing.
Voice is the most important part of being a writer. It goes along with finding your style and how you go about composing your writings. This sets the tone off of you as writer, and through voice you find your audience, which is another key component of writing. As I have journeyed through my own personal writing experience I struggled at first with finding my true voice. I had to later see that this is something that developed naturally and is very distinctive to different cultural experiences, backgrounds, personal growth, and other self acquired views of life in general. I learned to focus on allowing my voice to come naturally, and this in turn allowed me to develop organically and stop caring about trying to appeal to anyone in particular, and just curate writing content more focused on my internal views and mindset.
I read a lot, and have been doing so since I was in elementary school. When I go through the hundreds of books I have read overall I saw a pattern as I entered my teenage and adult years. Most of the authorsI generally liked tended to write in a more narrative journal style of writing. This I saw helped to see why my style of writing was this way. When I wrote in my personal life my voice lended itself to be more of a narrative style, which was my comfort zone. I in turn challenged myself to writing other pieces that were different just to see if I was capable. I had to go outside of my normal favorite authors to find others styles to try my best to imitate and make my own, which worked for both expanding my reading content, and further developing my voice in writing.
As we look into the ChatGPT world and how it is developing to meet the growing writing content world, I feel voice plays a very big part in the authenticity of the work being produced. Wether academic or creative as writers we all have certain style we chose to write inland we all use a certain type of vocabulary throughout our writing. When it comes to finding plagiarized works within academic writing it may be hard to decipher what has been organically created, and what has been generated using AI technology. This is because AI has been programmed to follow the voices of most writers, but this is where uniqueness come into affect. Recently read an article that questioned not the writing of the students producing the academic writings, but it looked further at the questions the professors were using to get the information from their students. It mentioned that if the questions being asked are superficial and not complex, then. the answers can be easily generated using AI technology. That then made me think should students be punished in academic writing for finding ways to complete work easier, or should professors be more complex in their questions to really dig deep and see how well students are receiving the information they are being taught?
I don’t think voice in writing is found until it is written. Every article, book, or blog you read all come from a distinct voice, one that’s unique. In my own collection of books, I can tell apart them many different voices from different authors. I can instantly tell the difference between an author like Colleen Hoover (who sometimes drives me crazy with her writing) as compared to an author like Sylvia Path. And honestly, at this point or even early on, if you had to make me guess who wrote what, I would be able to tell. Voice is kind of what sets all writers apart. Because yes, there are a gazillion writers in the world, but there are not gazillion of the same voices. And I think that already comes naturally, not something that needs much thought.
“Based on 20 checked articles, Originality was able to identify GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 content with almost 100% accuracy. When taking ChatGPT-generated content, accuracy drops to 90% at its lowest detection rate.”
This is important, mainly for students. English (and I hate to say it) it’s the most hated subject for many children in their academic career. I hear it all the time. ChatGPT is the leading gateway for students to avoid their hate and find an easy route. But if Originality can detect, this is helpful. Kids aren’t too interested in finding their voice in writing when they are younger. They care about getting a decent grade and getting the assignment over with. And to be honest, it’s kind of hard to change that mindset. But I do believe that the more you do something, the more you do tend to like it, or at least not hate it as much anymore. I speak from experience with green tea. Kids are going to do whatever it takes and they will find whatever they can use to get out of doing “hard work” thus, this makes it hard for educators or even bosses. But AI lacks that human voice, the most primal part to writing and even reading. Maybe you can detect it, or maybe you can’t but at least a tool like Originality was created in order to compact the loss of original writers in entirely.
Adjacent with many of the themes expressed at James McBride’s visit to Kean last month, I believe that the most significant problem in our society is how we treat one another.
In a world where people care more about one another than money or what that money can unlock, nobody starves, nobody sleeps on the streets, and we need no gun laws. That being said, this world is an idealistic fairytale.
The mounting fear around AI technology is justified because human beings are inherently suggestible to unethical behavior given the opportunity for personal gain. This gain may not be monetary; it may be a motivation of sloth and avoidance. At the same time, the perpetuated trepidation surrounding the subject matter is groundless. This tool may allow some people to behave unethically, but it will also empower others to revolutionize our society.
I do not know if I concur entirely with Reid Hoffman’s claim that “Technology Makes Us More Human.” Still, I do believe that advancing AI technology can help to highlight the diversity of human nature and expound on the black-and-white thinking of “Chat GPT is amazing and perfect” vs. “Chat GPT is evil.” Chat GPT does what the interacting human MAKES it do. Therefore, the technology cannot be evil; its creators and users can.
There will be students who try to take the easy way out, but as my mother loves to tell me every time I disagree with her advice, “You can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.” Not every student will be a good student, and that is okay. Society will NEVER be perfect. If that student wants to cheat, they’re going to find a way to cheat. They may even put more effort into finding a way to cheat than it would take to study and pass. I am not saying let students cheat by any means, but the war against cheating is as old as education, and maybe that should be examined more closely.
Just as the introduction of new AI technologies have highlighted the black-and-white thinking surrounding technology, they have also highlighted other problems like cheating culture.
This technology could very easily perpetuate laziness, but it could also perpetuate brilliance; it’s entirely dependent on the human behind the keyboard.
The official class site for Dr. Mia Zamora's Spring 2023 "Networked Narratives" course.
