By David Haldane

Dec. 15, 2022

I remember the day I became a writer.

It was 1970, and I had spent six months roaming the streets of Berlin in some vaguely youthful notion of discovering my family’s roots. Now it was winter and as I shivered alone in a primitively furnished room without heat, a kind of desperation set in. My friends and family were all far away. I barely had enough money to eat, let alone make my way home. And so, not knowing what else to do, I poured my heart out in a letter to a former girlfriend back in California. It became a daily routine. And ever since then, that routine has formed the core of my life. It’s what gives it continuity; the one act that, though ever changing in form, remains constant in its calming effect.

Though I was eventually able to earn a decent living—and even an adequate retirement—from my writing, that was never the goal. And so it was with some consternation that I read a recent essay in The Atlantic informing the world that artificial intelligence may soon supplant human effort in what I have come to regard as an almost-sacred act of faith and continuance.

“If you’re looking for historical analogues,” teacher and author Daniel Herman writes, “this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding.”

What he’s talking about is ChatGPT, a new chatbot app released by a previously obscure San Francisco, California, company that, according to those who’ve tried it, can equal—and sometimes exceed—human proficiency in the art and science of writing poetry and prose.

“What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor,” Herman asserts. “My life… is about to drastically change.” As are, I suppose, the lives of all of us who define ourselves primarily through writing.

But not everyone is convinced that this burgeoning literary competition will end so badly for humans.

While GPT can certainly “generate its own stories,” New Yorker columnist Jay Caspian Kang writes in an essay entitled “Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel?” it “can’t quite get beyond broad platitudes delivered in that same, officious voice. What it can generate on its own is certainly impressive… but it still feels, for the most part, like you’re watching a very precocious child perform a series of parlor tricks.”

And, indeed, after entering a public pun contest with material generated solely by ChatGPT, Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Eisen reported a resounding lashing at the tongue of champion—and thoroughly human—writer, filmmaker and punster Nikolai Vanyo. “I blamed my master, the robot,” Eisen lamented, “for giving me such thin material.”

The prospect of robots learning to write better than I can (arguably not a particularly noteworthy accomplishment) will never obliterate that activity’s primarily therapeutic function in my life. What it could do, though, is plunge me into one headache of an identity crisis the likes of which I never have known.

Which is why I couldn’t help but gawk at the almost arrogant pronouncement of a union leader overseeing the recent one-day walkout by staff writers at the New York Times. “Without all the workers at The Times,” she declared, “this place is an empty building… a blank page.”

How I wish I possessed her confidence.

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David Haldane’s latest book, “A Tooth in My Popsicle and Other Ebullient Essays on Becoming Filipino,” is now available for pre-order on Amazon. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, where he helped write two Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, Haldane is an award-winning journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Northern Mindanao, Philippines. This column appears weekly in the Mindanao Gold Star Daily.