I wasn’t always so staunchly critical of AI. That came later, as more facts surfaced and the reality became impossible to ignore. In spring of last year, I wrote an academic paper arguing the potential benefits of AI in education. At the time, it was clear that AI was nowhere near ready for prime time. But over the months that followed, as new information came out, I turned firmly against it. AI still isn’t ready. It can’t even do basic arithmetic reliably. Yet its rollout was already happening. Our world is running in a faulty beta version.
Even so, I understand AI isn’t going away. I just hope that those of us who saw the impending dangers aren’t screwed over with those who charged full steam ahead into outsourcing basic thinking skills. Still, we’ll eventually have to define some reasonable limits that both sides can at least tolerate. But generative AI is not that limit. Generative systems depend on stealing work. LibGen never paid me a cent for my books that are confirmed to me among those stolen.
Because I prefer to experiment firsthand so that I can speak from experience, and to see whether there’s any workable middle ground, I decided to test one of the a claim I saw cropping up more, that AI might be useful for feedback and editing. Everyone knows how rare it is to get thoughtful, competent critique. It can be hard not to cry when someone is willing to tell you the truth! And unlike generating prose, offering initial feedback isn’t typically considered a job or a commodity that pays anyone. So I figured it wouldn’t be actively displacing worker.
I first decided to see what it would say to a little ditty that someone on Reddit said would probably get a glowing review…
…and this review is too absurd not to share verbatim…
Well, to conduct a test using a section of one of my abandoned manuscripts, I would have to tell AI to be a bit more critical, and spent a bit of time refining the editing prompt, trying to counter AI’s default tendency to lavish hollow praise on everything, and decided on:
I’ll share the text I gave here since copying it from Pages and pasting it borked the paragraph spacing and made for a wall o’ text a la
The text:
Nellie sat in the gazebo with her laptop open but untouched, pretending to edit a chapter she already knew she’d burn. She tried to focus on the words, but her mind kept circling back to the way Dominic’s mouth had pressed against hers the night before. Rough…almost angry…and how she hadn’t pulled away.
She swallowed hard, her fingers hovering over the keyboard as if she could force herself to care about the sentences in front of her, but it was futile until she had a chance to see him and find out what it really meant to him.
The sound of the back door jolted her. She didn’t look up, trying instead to pretend she was working.
But then his shadow fell across her screen, darkening the rows of words she’d stared through for the last hour.
When she finally raised her eyes, Dominic stood just outside the threshold, his expression carved into that terrible mask of practiced neutrality that always came before he said something awful. Her heart sank.
“Nellie.” Her name came out strangled. “I need to tell you something before—”
He stopped. Ran his hand down his face. His mouth opened, then closed again.
Nellie’s chest tightened with each second that passed. Whatever he couldn’t say, whatever made his jaw clench and his eyes dart away from hers, would destroy her. She knew it the way she knew her own heartbeat.’
“Just say it,” she whipered.
He looked past her, over her head, anywhere but at her face. His jaw worked. “I’m…getting married. Candace is pregnant.”
The world tilted. Her fingers tightened. Her heart threw itself against her ribs.
“I see.”
“We hadn’t…” He dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it wild. “Things between us were already finished. You know that. But now—”
“Now you’re trapped.” The words escaped before she could cage them. Vicious. True.
His eyes snapped to hers and she saw her own anguish reflected there. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t say what we’re both thinking?” She stood, her chair scraping against wood like a scream. “That you’re about to marry someone you don’t love because of a mistake you made when you were trying to forget—”
“Stop.” The word cracked like a whip.
Years of swallowing her heart, of pretending friendship was enough, of watching him fumble through relationships with women who would never understand the way his mind worked, the way his silence could be more eloquent than poetry—it all came rushing up her throat like poison.
“You think I don’t know?” Her voice broke on the words. “You think I haven’t been watching you destroy yourself trying to feel something for her? Anything for her?“
“Nellie—”
“I’ve loved you since we were seventeen years old.” The confession tore out of her like a scream. “I’ve loved you through every woman you’ve brought home, every relationship you’ve used to convince yourself you could be normal, could be happy with someone who doesn’t see you the way I—”
“Don’t.” He stepped forward, his face drawn. “Please don’t.”
“Why? Because it’s true? Because you know it’s true?” Tears began to streaming down her face now, hot and relentless. “Because you love me too and you’re too much of a coward to—“
“It doesn’t matter.” The words hit her like a slap. “It can’t matter. Not anymore.”
The silence stretched between them like a taut wire, ready to snap. Something inside Nellie’s chest caved in, collapse like a building with its supports cut away. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“You’re right.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I never mattered.”
She moved to step past him, but he caught her wrist. His thumb brushed across her pulse point. Her treacherous heart leap toward him one last time.
“Nellie, I—”
“Don’t.” She pulled free, the absence of his touch like ice water in her veins. “Don’t make this harder than it already is.”
She walked toward the house on unsteady legs, each step an act of will. At the door, she turned back. He was still standing there, watching her go, his face a map of every road they’d never travel together.
“Congratulations,” she said, her mouth dry as ash. “I hope you’ll be very happy. Really.”
Then she went inside and closed the door, sliding down it until she was sitting on the floor, her back pressed against wood that still held the warmth of the summer sun. She pressed her hands to her mouth to muffle the sound of her heart breaking. For one terrible moment, she thought about running back out there, throwing herself at his feet, begging him to choose her instead.
But she didn’t move. Love without choice was just another word for suffering.
And they’d both suffered enough.
The response wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. It reminded me of a horoscope. Its detailed enough to seem helpful enough, but it’s general enough that it can be applied without harm:
Hm. I like the heart line, though I suppose the building one is out of place. I was watching a YouTube video not long before this about a mall that partially collapsed. (Yes, I do watch disaster videos, including a lot of airplane ones since I’m a licensed pilot.) So fair point on that one, ChatGPT. But the rest is still men.
Then I decided to tell ChatGPT to…
🧐
That isn’t my idea of improvement. It’s clear still, I suppose, and you can tell that’s supposed to be some emotion, but feels dry. What would ChatGPT say to its on prose? Time for a new chat window.
To my prose, reduce metaphors, but then to its own…introduce more metaphors? Simplify imagery…then it’s lacking vivid imagery?
That’s not great. That’s not even good. That’s how it would improve its own work that was meant to improve mine?
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