“But isn’t that cheating?” a writer friend asked when I mentioned that I’m learning to incorporate ChatGPT into my writing workflow. So we’re not friends anymore.
No, no, that’s not true. We had a fascinating discussion about it. I won’t try to reconstruct it, but I will dig into why I’ve come to embrace a tool that I, too, was skeptical about when it burst onto the scene not long ago.
And I was skeptical. Very. My initial experiments with ChatGPT produced poor results. Media portrayals of how it worked were shallow at best and often wrong. That, and what I saw people doing with it, led me to think of it as a plagiarism machine. After I explored its capabilities a little more I changed my mind. While it can be used unethically, that doesn’t change the value of the tool, and I don’t think it’s “cheating” to work with it.
CNC Routers and Woodworking
Bear with me on a digression. One of my hobbies is woodworking. That community has a lot of people who believe that using power tools isn’t “real” woodworking. It’s not butch enough if you flip a switch; you must do everything with hand tools. Of course, if you drill into that opinion (YSWIDT) you discover that they can’t back it up with much more than “because it makes it too easy.” Weird flex, my dude. (It is almost always a dude.) Do you fell your own timber, then mill it from the trunk, and so on? What does “too easy” mean?
But even people who accept power tools often balk at one in particular: the CNC router. A CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router uses computer code to cut complex shapes into and out of wood. Using a CNC router allows woodworkers to create amazing designs and shapes that would be difficult if not impossible to create by hand. An easy way to start an argument in the woodworking community is to talk smack about CNC machines, either pro or con. And the most common criticism is that using one is “cheating.”
That’s a load of crap. When you use a CNC machine, it’s only doing what you tell it to. It’s still executing on the decisions you make and the design you give it. It expands the range of what you can create. And by “you,” I mean “not me,” because I don’t have space for one in my shop. But I’d get one if I could.
ChatGPT is a Power Tool
Using ChatGPT is more complicated than using a CNC. You can’t put a slab of wood onto a CNC, turn it on, and expect something to emerge. Whereas with ChatGPT, you can certainly give it a shallow prompt and it will generate output that looks like something a human might have written. It looks like something that a particularly ignorant first-year high school student might have written, but it’s something. But ChatGPT is tool that can help you create something with greater detail and depth than you could without it, so in that way it’s similar.
Using ChatGPT looks like cheating because it seems like you’re getting something for nothing. And it’s fair to say that some people are using it that way. I don’t even have to cite any examples; you’ll probably see an article in the news *today* about how someone tried to pull a fast one with ChatGPT and it blew up in their face. Because ChatGPT is so much more robust at simulating human thought, it’s easy for people who are lazy, unethical, or both, to use it poorly.
It’s only “cheating” if you use it to cheat–such as trying to pass off its writing as your own. But that’s simple plagiarism, and it’s wrong whether you’re buying a term paper from a human writer and turning it in with your name on it or having a computer create the paper. Using ChatGPT as a sounding board, or a way to challenge your thinking, or to enhance what you would do on your own without it? None of those examples is “cheating,” unless you want to be like the weirdos who look down on people who use table saws.
Learning to use Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will change the way you work. Word processors did, too. So did the invention of the disposable ink pen, and the fountain pen, and so on. The tool is an extension of the user. Learning to use ChatGPT doesn’t make you less of a writer; it only makes you a different kind of writer. It isn’t cheating. It’s adapting.
Are you using ChatGPT? What difficulties are you encountering with it? Leave questions in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them in future posts.
Sam Falco 