In New York the other week I had beers with a friend – Matt was the Frugal Traveler for the New York Times – who told me he had had an argument recently with a woman who claimed, not very originally, that travel broadens and opens people’s minds.
“More people are traveling now than ever before in history,” Matt told her, “and around the world there is an increase in authoritarianism, nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and racism.”
Of course, there’s always the possibility that all of those things would be greater if people didn’t travel. Evelyn Waugh was once approached by a woman who had witnessed his famously curt behavior and expressed surprise that someone who called himself a Catholic would act so rudely.
“Imagine,” Waugh told her, “how much worse I’d be if I weren’t a Catholic.”
John Updike and John Cheever shared a number of similarities: Both spent their careers publishing in the New Yorker and both focused on the everyday lives of middle-class Americans. They were both celebrated as brilliant chroniclers of suburbia. And each man produced a child who became a writer: David Updike and Susan Cheever.
And while both men’s marriages were marked by infidelity, they both possessed a religious faith – and a dutiful explanation for it. Updike, a regular church-goer, once said that not to believe in a higher power would have seemed “ungrateful.” Cheever, according to this weekend’s Wall Street Journal (in a review of a new book by his daughter), was a practicing Anglican who said: “There has to be someone to thank for the party.”
I read a lot of articles about AI but only articles written by writers, as its employment by members of my tribe is what interests as well as disturbs me. I understand why, at universities, students are thrilled with the technology (at least the non-English majors). And in the professional world, it’s clear why people who find writing difficult are also embracing it.
Writers find writing difficult; Thomas Mann said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” But we take great satisfaction in capturing a thought, or a feeling, or a moment in words; we feel like a pitcher who hits all the corners with his impressive arsenal of pitches. The writers I’ve read on AI all praise its capabilities, and say they use it for things like planning, even critiquing (which apparently includes a great deal of flattery), but not for writing. The ones who use it for writing are probably not writing about it.
Though in a recent article, one writer admitted that he had been having trouble, in another piece, with his ending. After he came up with one, he asked ChatGPT for some other endings, a few of which, the writer confessed, were better than his own. But to use them, it seems to me, would have been the same as plagiarism, which is one of the cardinal sins of writing. I have never been tempted to plagiarize – for ethical as well as egotistical reasons. Why use someone else’s words when I can come up with better ones? Will my thinking change with ChatGPT? I doubt it. Even if its writing is superior to mine – it won’t be mine. And the primary pleasure of writing – giving meaningful expression to personal experience – will disappear.
In the current Spectator, Rory Sutherland wonders: "Is it just me, or is there something odd with the culture when the world's most successful musician has absolutely no appeal to men whatsoever?
Even the people I root for on Jeopardy! are losing.