to be a copycat of someone else.
If machines have personalities, it’s our doing. ChatGPT sure has been in the news lately. I’m not surprised to see it all over social media feeds, given how monolithic those feeds tend to be. “ChatGPT this, ChatGPT that” say the marketers like proud parents of a new toddler to anyone who will look their way.
It’s not GPT3’s fault that humans have a well-documented propensity for conning each other. Two years of pandemic isolation behind screens may have exacerbated the issue of bullying in the workplace. Complex PTSD is real.
Two intelligent discussions about the AI bot in newsletters I read raise interesting questions. Questions prepare us to address potential scenarios like Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). You may recall that initially, everyone considers HAL a dependable member of the crew. People saw it maintaining ship functions and engaging genially with his human crew-mates on an equal footing. Then things changed.
A new powerful tool gives us confidence. But I wonder how many dare to question what’s behind and inside it at the onset. Before it becomes a HAL, first slowly, then all of a sudden. Anne Libby asks: can language models be too big? She even has a form of bullying as an example. Ted Gioia puts it more bluntly: at what point does ChatGPT learn not to lie?
”It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.” Mike (Joe Mantegna) explains con games to Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet’s House of Games. The “con” is at a marine’s expense (William Macy). Mamet’s directorial debut.
We attribute personalities to machines, because that’s what humans do. However, the danger with AI is to think of it as “intelligence.’ That’s what the technologists want us to think, by the way. Language is powerful and this is intentional. Steve Wozniak says we’re quite far from AI being intelligent. People are behind the way it’s built and it becomes the result of their choices.
If you looked up the definition of “intelligence,” you’ll have found that it involves the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason. ChatGPT cannot answer factual questions. In my optimism, I prefer to think that most of us do, especially when we resist the allure of screens and cheap fame.
Artists worry that AI will take their work away. I include writers like me and many of you in the definition of artist. I’m an optimist again here. Chat bots annoy me even when they provide the information I need. Because they pretend to be persons. They have no sense of taste, texture, or nuance. We use them because they’re convenient. But careful to destroy culture for the sake of efficiency.
And that brings me to the delightful conversation I had with Nick Parker on tone of voice. Nick says humor done badly doesn’t work. So there’s hope for the playful side of human nature. I talked to Nick in early November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT right after our conversation. Given the attempts I’ve seen so far, it’s safe to say that while it may compose (or rip off) verse and prose, it’s not exactly what I would call ‘finding your natural way to be’ in writing.
Good communication conveys a message clearly. Surprise helps the message stick. But there’s a little bit more to it than that. Nick says that
the best communication is always “a dance
between clarity and surprise.”
For years, he thought he got that quote from neuro-linguist Steven Pinker’s book, Sense of Style. He just checked. Turns out it was something he’d written in a margin. It sounded insightful coming from Pinker. “Sounds a bit pretentious coming from me.” I know how he feels.
At some point in his career, Nick was a joke writer. So it won’t be surprising that he still thinks of all writing as essentially joke-writing—focus people’s attention so they arrive at your punchline bang on time, with all the information they need for the lightbulb to go on. With the bonus of laughter and cheering. “Laughter is just the sound we make when all the truth arrives at once.”
You can read more about some of the examples he brought up in Tone Knob, a newsletter on tone of voice. My favorite on the CIA, the really serious language that sounds like corporations think they sound like, and Unchained Labs, the un-sciency sounding particle analyzers that sound like surfer dudes. Lemon Recruiting is the Company that sounds and look like Dungeons and Dragons. There’s also a Lemon Insurance. I’m guessing these companies don’t take issue to American slang for “lemon.”
Net/net, when you speak with your own voice, it becomes a force-multiplier in connecting with people. Journalist legend Oriana Fallaci would have agreed with Nick. During her career she was able to master tone in voice in two languages: her native Italian, and English. And that’s because she got intimate with culture and her own point of view.
”We need to talk about politics in a different way,” she said. “Politics isn’t boring; it’s entertaining, even funny.”* But she would have been unimpressed by how politicians went for entertainment alone, leaving the substance behind. Which is interesting, because there needs to be balance, even in personality. Or we have the “cult” part of culture in the same ways we have “con” from confidence. Nick talks about finding a path to writing from character.
Context is everything. And I haven’t found a machine that gets a situation like a human being would face-to-face. The in-person part is where the value is—remembering that there’s a person reading can help you be a person writing. Fallaci interviewed some of the most powerful people of her time—Ariel Sharon, Yassir Arafat, the former Shah of Iran, Lech Walesa, the Dalai Lama, Robert Kennedy, Henry Kissinger—and treated them as human beings.
You may find her collection, Interviews with History and Conversations with Power enlightening. Take for example a question she put to Imam Khomeini: “you always talk about the West in hard or critical terms. All of your judgments make it seem as though you view us as champions of every ugliness, every perversity. And yet the West took you in when you were in exile, and took in many of your collaborators, many of whom actually studied in the West. Many studied free of charge, with scholarships. Don’t you think that there might be something good in us?” She called it “humor of power.”
Fallaci was not in the business of provoking. She brought a formidable amount of background knowledge to each interview. Her aim was to get at a truth and she was a brilliant writer, a light in the darkness. If you ever want an example of the power of language and tone, I recommend reading her work.
And that’s just it—reading is everything to writing. If you’re just starting out, read lots and lots of different things. I read poetry, fiction, the classics are often in my rotation, some quality newsletters and articles. In reading, I observe the pace of writing, the words authors use, I feel the emotions, notice tone of voice. There’s no substitute for immersing yourself in a well-written book. That’s why I recommend so many, and so diverse.
One of the Italian newsletters I read quoted photographer Michele Pellegrino, “Photography has to show things that no one generally looks at, it has to shift the gaze.” I started this newsletter to show you the importance of framing differently to connect ideas we thought unrelated. That remains my value proposition. And it’s just it: I can propose. It’s up to you to activate.
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* From the marvelous biography by Cristina de Stefano, Oriana Fallaci: the Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend (Other Press, 2021) in the superb translation by Mariana Harss.
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[Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay]