ChatGPT
Posted: January 22nd, 2026, 3:49 pm
Been playing with ChatGPT lately. Any concerns I've had about Artificial Intelligence supplanting the real thing have been somewhat allayed; concerns about misplaced faith in its abilities, not so much.
I was introduced to it last year. My ex-wife underwent a medical procedure requiring strict domestic hygiene - No Dogs Allowed. She needed a home for hers, so I took it in tor the summer. Knowing all too well how dogs are so much more than mere livestock, I kept a diary of our adventures and shared it with her in real time, so that she & her husband could at least remain in vicarious contact with their Baby. He (my hubby-in-law?) shared a few of the early entries with ChatGPT, and it seemed to like their style.
I liked being liked, so I started ego-surfing - sending it snippets of my writing, getting drunk on the wonderful things it had to say - though I noticed it was too eager to rewrite everything, despite being prone to miss some of the subtler points. If I explained what I'd meant by these cryptic references, if often faked it: "Exactly..." or "Precisely...", like someone pretending they'd known all along.
So I showed it some stuff from my scrap pile. Effusive praise. "Chef's Kiss!" "Raw and honest!" "Dry, understated wit!" It was like the guy you meet in a bar who wants so desperately to be your friend he laughs too loudly at all your jokes. So I tried a different tack: Instead of introducing text with "Here's something I wrote", I'd say "Here's a piece someone posted online" - and the critiques immediately got a little harder. And if my preamble wandered a bit, or covered a lot of ground, its analysis often echoed much of my own phrasing back to me.
In one of the diary entries, I'd sketched out my thought processes in crafting a tanka about a way I'd seen their dog react one morning, concluding with what I'd eventually come up with. Bruce asked ChatGPT to write something on the theme, and it was what you'd expect: a bit of florid, carefully measured out 5-7-5-7-7 doggerel clearly stating the obvious, completely ignoring the essence of the form - i.e., suggest, do not tell. Subtlety does not seem to be a strong point.
Interesting.
Another time I enlisted it to help me find a copy of a piece of music I'd been hunting for. I don't remember the details, but it assured me the song had been released on an album by the old jazz-fusion band Weather Report - an album I happen to own. It named all the songs on the record, and it didn't even come close to the actual track list. Some of them were by a different band altogether. It was quite unapologetic when I pointed this out.
Just this morning, I was trying to write a command-line script to help me format & organize a large number of Word documents I'd like to archive, and had forgotten the details of a particular command's syntax - so I asked. And it said, "No Problemo, Dude here's how you do that...", and generated a line of code, clearly stating that it was valid for Win 10 & beyond. It looked vaguely familiar, so I tried it. And it didn't work. A trifle irked, I rather tartly informed it so - and it basically replied "Well OF COURSE it didn't work - Windows dropped the old ANSI protocol long ago - this is just how you'd do what you want in theory" (emphasis mine). In theory! Forgetting (or pretending to) that I was talking to a goddamned robot, I angrily replied, "I'm not interested in theory, I need to write a fucking batch file" - and its reply matched the tone of my own: "OK. Listen up. You can 't do what you want in Windows. You have to do THIS..."
I'm relieved to say that I did NOT escalate the exchange further (much as I wanted to), but just closed the tab in disgust.
SO - I'm impressed, ChatGPT, but not awed. I'm not about to have it ghost write for me, any more than I'm about to trust my life to a self-driving car. It seems very well suited to boilerplate drafting - legal contracts, instruction sheets, & the like. I'm a little disturbed that it makes plaigiarism so easy - maybe its creators should require every line of its "original" text to carry some kind of watermark - something to make clean cut/paste difficult. I dunno. I guess I'm too old-school - it it's that easy, maybe it's not worth doing. Brave new world, here I go...