Is it live or is it Memorex? Are you reading GPT or me?
“Is it live or is it Memorex?” was the question advertisers once posed, trying to challenge our ears to spot the difference between live music and recordings. Spoiler alert: our ears failed. With top-notch recording technology, speakers, and perhaps a bit of tone-deafness, it’s all just… music.
Fast forward to today, and I’m staring at my screen, late at night, scotch in hand. When you read an article like this, are you indulging in the musings of an alcohol or caffeine-fueled writer, or are you being wooed by a machine with more circuits than sense?
Human writers, with all our quirks and addictions, draw from a soup of emotions, experiences, and that one embarrassing memory from high school where Sister Meta physically pushed me down in the hall. Machines, on the flip side, don’t feel. Machines mimic understanding based on the enormous data diets they’re fed. Their diet is more varied than mine. GPT has certainly read more than I ever have, despite my impressive English degree from the University of Wyoming.
AI can flawlessly match our style, tone, and occasionally our wit. It doesn’t have our flair for unpredictability. A machine doesn’t throw a curveball or give tangential unsolicited advice. It doesn’t admit to feeling existential dread on Sunday evenings, and it certainly doesn’t write to vent, inspire, or subtly brag about its birdwatching skills.
From a reader’s angle, it might seem like a toss-up between human ramblings and machine mumbo-jumbo. If both sound like Shakespeare on a good day, does it matter who’s behind the curtain?
AI isn’t just the elephant in the room. It is the room full of elephants banging away at keyboards, wondering why they don’t let the monkeys do the typing. Then you realize the monkeys are typing away too in the next room. And you can’t tell the difference between the prose of the primates and the pachyderms and my friend Paul.
Words just sound like words and unless we’re in person, watching over each other’s shoulders, we will never again know for sure who or what is creating anything.
We can pretend that we infuse more soul into our words than AI, but do we really? Aren’t we too, generally just copying other stuff that has seeped into our unconscious? Machines have the vocabulary of a thousand thesauruses and are slowly learning the human touch, the emotions, and yes, the occasional bad pun, that make the story sing.
So what is the the human encore that brings the house down? Is writing dead? Will it give way to new means of expression? New creative outlets where it’s more obvious that it’s us? Will handwritten notes make a comeback? Will we turn off the machines and actually talk to each other?
I hope so.
