Asking ChatGPT about yourself feels like the 2023 version of what Googling yourself was in 2003. Reading other people’s conversations with ChatGPT feels like hearing about their dreams. Beyond lovers and psychotherapists, it’s easy to overestimate how interesting others will find it. They, too, have dreams just as strange and vivid.
(I did a straw poll and many friends had never heard of it. It’s worth signing up and having a play if you haven’t.)
So I’ll try to be mercifully concise. But my focus, as always, is the question: How does this technological interaction change my sense of who I am? I had to ask it to write my biography. There’s a momentary pang of vanity and fear as I realise that I, too, am inside this thing.
ChatGPT thinks I’m way more successful than I am. Venice Biennale. Ars Electronica. Lumen Prize. Its spookily similar to the voice of anxiety in my head that tells me what I should have achieved by now if I don’t want to consider myself a failure. It’s not a helpful voice. But there’s something oddly cathartic about hearing a robot replicate it. Perhaps this voice is the voice of conformity and I’m reassured to unmask that voice as little more than a mangled mashup of what people say online.
ChatGPT’s fabrications are not entirely unfounded. Most online content about me is written by me, and I tend to write self-promotion more than vulnerable confession (though I’m improving at the latter). Apparently, I succeeded in making the right impression.
If you’re looking for reasons to dismiss ChatGPT, as I suspect many professional writers are inclined to do, then its easy to fixate on its looseness with facts. See James Bridle in the Guardian or Ted Chiang in the New Yorker, both good reads.
But my motivation is more utilitarian. In the artworld, organisations try to help artists by asking them to compete in filling out forms for a chance at winning a small amount of cash or a space to exhibit, and the status symbol of a logo you stick at the bottom of your poster. They could make it easy for us but the power is well-stacked in their favour, so instead each ‘call for proposals’ comes with its own perverse requirements: describe your practice in 150 words, your project in 1000 characters, now write 500 characters about us and why we’re so great. (They usually frame this last one as ‘why is this opportunity a good fit for you?’)
It’s a kind of neoliberal Hunger Games that I keep accidentally sleepwalking into. Instead of making art I spend my time writing about the art I’d make if only I had the time to make it.
ChatGPT’s loose grasp of reality and lack of intellectual originality is not such a problem. That’s the fun bit. I already have piles of ideas, brainstorms, rejected proposals (plenty of those). The tedium of funding applications is in fitting what I want to do into the ideology and bureaucratic processes of the funder. Now, I can simply feed my ideas into ChatGPT as part of my request and ask it to rephrase for the submission form. No good? Tweak and try again.
It’s tempting to think this will save me from this bureaucratic grudge work. ChatGPT can write my applications. But it can also write everyone else’s. And that’s the real problem with ChatGPT: other people also have it. At least, they do during this possibly brief experiment of open democratic access.
How will the grant panels cope with so much gold? Perhaps they too will delegate to ChatGPT. Our lives can be ruled by AIs battling each other. I’m reminded of this wonderful line attributed to Slavoj Žižek:
ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want
Except, I can’t find a source beyond that random tweet. Did he really say that? Or is it from The Infinite Conversation, Giacomo Miceli’s project using AI to simulate an endless converation between Žižek and Werner Herzog?
It’s only going to get weirder.
Tim
Montreal, 24 Mar 2023