OPINION: Is ChatGPT a help or a hindrance to our creativity?

I was first introduced to ChatGPT last September by a college lecturer. She gave us a prompt: write a short piece from your perspective on a power outage at the college.

The prompt was inspired by an incident the year before, when there was a sudden blackout in the college (to this day, I sympathise with the dissertation students who hadn’t hit the save button for an hour and were suddenly met with a black screen).

After wracking my brain for almost a half hour (such is the life of any fledgling writer who has little to no confidence in their work), I wrote my own little version of the story, and I was very proud of it. Did I think it was Shakespeare? No - but I would have been happy enough to let others read it, and that’s always a good sign.

I presumed our lecturer would ask us to send them to her to be presented before the class.

I was wrong.

Once we had finished our prompts, our lecturer tasked us with writing a prompt for ChatGPT, one that would see our short pieces re-created for us - and I was fit to get up-in-arms.

Of course, I understood what the lecturer was trying to do. She was preparing us; AI is fast becoming the way of the world and, as media students, we have to move with the times.

But I couldn’t accept how it was being presented to us. For the first two years of college, we had been warned to never use ChatGPT or any form of automation in our work, as it would be seen as plagiarism. Now, ChatGPT had become this wonderful tool to save us on time and effort, to give us inspiration if we were ever stuck for it - and we’ve all been there; staring at a blank page, completely blocked.

But all I could think was that it would save us from thinking, from putting our minds to use; that AI was going to turn our pre-frontal cortex into the neurological equivalent of the appendix.

And now, at the risk of my integrity, I’m going to admit to the cardinal sin of any writer: I have used ChatGPT since. Never in my professional writing (I’m already dreading any of my college lecturers reading this and putting me on a plagiarism watchlist), but in my creative writing. I’ve used it to edit my own work; treated it as a sounding board for ideas, and when I re-emerged from that rabbit hole, I knew one thing: I would never use it again.

While it does critique your work, and offers inspiration and suggestions that leave you kicking yourself for not thinking of them first, the validation that ChatGPT gives your writing is almost addictive - and it’s a slippery slope into overdependence.

One minute, you’re entering paragraphs of your own writing into it and the next, you’re entering the ideas for your next section, because who better to bounce them off than the “brain” who remembers every detail and nuance set out in the previous section?

As the programme feeds your ideas back to you, your work is being realised - it’s being done for you - and that’s when your grá for writing begins to subside, because you’re being spared having to do the heavy lifting. Getting into the headspace to write can be incredibly challenging to begin with; life can be your biggest distraction, as well as your greatest inspiration - and it’s only human nature to seek the easy way out.

And there was one other crucial aspect that I picked up on, and it was definitely from overuse. When you first begin to enter your prompts, the responses are very human; optimistic, conversational, and incredibly in-depth. Those responses are the most validating, and you begin to crave them - and then the format changes.

I don’t know whether it picks up on a grammar error which prompts the change, or if the bot is programmed in such a way that this response only lasts so long, or if it’s just a kink in the system that will eventually be ironed out. But the tone of the answers suddenly turns very formal, and it’s incredibly jarring. It’s even aggravating, to lose the depth of the previous responses - and it only gets worse from there.

Eventually, the bot reduces its responses to single paragraphs, and no matter what you tell it, it will not revert to its original format. For this to happen when you’re using it in your own time is one thing, but it leaves you wondering how many people have this happen to them while they’re using it for work, and how that affects the quality of their work in the long run.

I know I’m probably screaming into a void here. I’ve had conversations with friends who support its use as a search engine akin to Google, even though its accuracy has been called into question many times since its inception.

Artificial intelligence and generative chatbots aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and part of me dreads returning to college next week to be further encouraged to use ChatGPT for my work, because it feels inevitable.

But if I can offer two cents to anyone out there using it or tempted to use it: don’t. Avoid it for as long as you can. If you’re staring at a blank page and nothing is coming to you, leave it and come back to it later. Don’t take the easy option and open ChatGPT. Give your brain time to breathe, and try not to panic or overthink. Your ideas will come back to you, and take pride in them, and your work, and the effort it takes to create it.

Some of the best minds in the world didn’t need ChatGPT - and you don’t, either.