I have a friend: I may have once called him a robot bootlicker, but here let’s call him Bob. It’s not uncommon for other friends to mention AI near Bob and I…and then bust out popcorn. I want to tell you a story about Bob’s failure to produce an AI story.
Bob is a member of my book club, and a few months ago he didn’t have time to read our book. So he asked GPT4 to prepare some notes for him–just like reading Sparknotes for class, right? Well, unlike the human editors at older services, the AI doesn’t really have a context for what kinds of discussion might happen at our book club. It certainly doesn’t know who’s going to ask about the historical context or that this group likes to unpack character motivations.
The notes Bob read that afternoon didn’t prepare him for our conversation, and his occasional contributions really only highlighted how little he’d encountered the book. Given that my rusty teacher instincts were pinging, I asked Bob after the meeting if he’d let me take a look at whatever notes he’d been using–since we disagree about AI, he’d even come prepared with his zero-shot prompt so I could see why his results were so limited.
Bob employed an approach I’ve seen in many discussions of AI use: a simple directive to expand or develop the initial chunk of text. Since he hadn’t read enough of the book to have a clearer idea of its goals or plot, Bob’s prompts asked first for notes and then for the AI to expand on thematic areas of the novel and develop some talking points based on the book’s social context. Both those prompts are so broad that the returned text read like an eighth grader’s book report–an eighth grader that hadn’t actually done the reading.
Like any tool, AI requires learning and practice. Simply asking ChatGPT (or Hemingway or WordPress’ “editor”, or or) to redirect a chunk of its text doesn’t get us any closer to our goals or a piece of writing appropriate for a real context. It’s not any smarter than we are, and I imagine you can remember at least one instance when a teacher told you to develop an essay and you had no idea how. Without developing our own expertise in polishing the AI mirror to show us our own thinking in productive ways–and without our own thinking to get us started, general directives to make something more….? are most likely to return us only more empty noise.
Something Polished 