Oh, using AI for creative work? What a terrible idea. Why would you want a tool that can help brainstorm endlessly, generate ideas at 3 a.m. without complaint, or instantly mock up ten versions of your concept while you sip coffee? No, no—true creativity only happens when you’re crying over a blank page, questioning your life choices, and deleting the same sentence seventeen times. Letting AI help is basically cheating, like asking your imaginary friend to co-write your novel—except this one can spell. Besides, what’s more artistic than existential dread and deadline panic?
Chat GPT wrote that for me when I asked it to ‘write me a paragraph on why you shouldn’t use AI for creative work and make it amusing’
And it’s not very good. In fact, I’d go so far as saying it is a load of shite.
Before we get on to my personal gripes, let’s remove ourselves from the question and look at what is making the answer. Somewhere in the world, likely America (Texas if it’s Chat GPT). maybe the UAE, maybe China, could even be Greece, Taiwan, Thailand, or Chile, there is a huge warehouse hosting a supercomputer and thousands of servers. Due to the requirement of vast space, these data houses are often in sparsely lived areas, which means, by default, that the huge amount of water they need to keep cool comes from some of the world’s driest parts.
Those servers are working from an algorithm, collated from every corner of the internet, including well known factual hubs like Wikipedia and X, the latter being where true opinion goes to die on the right-hand side of the coffin. They are under next-to-no authority, so much so that the lines between fact and propaganda are quickly becoming blurred. At present the servers are using everyone else’s opinion to form their own, but when all of the available opinions are theirs then we have a world dictated by robots. Or Elon Musk. Though I think the two might be mutually exclusive and equally scary.
AI can try as hard as it likes but it doesn’t have personality, humour, or nuance. When I asked Chat GPT to write me a piece in the style of my excellent food blog, it suggested a style with ‘dry humour, a touch of grumpiness, some heartfelt praise (where earned), and no patience for nonsense’. It hasn’t come to that opinion by itself, because it has no opinion. Instead it crawled the internet to suggest that’s how it was viewed by others. And as much as it is a compliment to have my writing style so accurately surmised, it simply can’t replicate the mess that goes on in my head. How I’m feeling when I write the piece. What memories it conjured up. What the food actually tasted like. I’d never write “worshipped by a committee of people who find cumin a bit spicy”. That’s awful writing. It’s not funny. I’m not even sure it is technically correct.
The people who use it are becoming more and more obvious. Put rubbish into Chat GPT and it’ll simply churn out different rubbish. We can see the not-so-subtle transition into a new format, especially when it’s littered with generic AI nonsense like “a window into what they do best at a price that doesn’t feel like punishment”. It misses the details that enrich human life; the interactions and the emotions. The bits that a computer can’t see. Ultimately the bits that make the world a real place and not monolithic.
As someone who copywrites I don’t feel necessarily threatened by Chat GPT because they’ll always be a race to the bottom of the ocean for those who want the cheapest option, and I have no intention of being the cheapest option because I value the inner workings of my head. Could a server write a newsletter based on a chef’s recent holiday to Italy? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have the same emotiveness because it would be pulling up an internet’s worth of blogs and articles about that spot. Me, I’ve stood there, overlooked the sea and felt the culture wash over me in a haze of local red wine. Life got me here. I’m going to be just fine working it out for myself.
I am Simon Carlo, a food blogger, journalist, copywriter and bonafide mild child. The above words are mine. Mostly. The gooder ones anyway.
