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The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Chatbots Are Lousy Writers. So Are a Lot of Writers

Humans have been counterfeiting “good” prose for years. AI just sped up the process

Elizabeth Bishop tinkering with a five-page poem about a moose for twenty-six years. Gay Talese affixing his writing to a wall and scrutinizing it, from across the room, through binoculars. Chris Ware taking pains to build bespoke fonts and hand-letter his comics. Brian Wilson taking seven months to record the fragments he’d splice together to make the single “Good Vibrations.” Stanley Kubrick amassing 276 books on Napoleon, toward a film he ultimately never shot. Writers and artists who take their time—and take their work too seriously—charm me.

Chatbots, on the other hand, don’t charm. It’s not just that they guzzle up the work of the writers and artists (without permission) and the writers and artists’ water (up to 5 million gallons a day to slake some data centres). It’s that the bots reinforce the misguided belief that speed and efficiency are inherently good things. It’s that they take seconds, not decades, to compose their five-page moose poems.

Granted, five-page moose poems probably shouldn’t take a quarter of a century to complete. Bishop was a perfectionist. The spine of her Complete Poems, her life’s work, is soberingly narrow.

But a great work of art demands great labour. It wants fussiness, obsessiveness, struggle. It wastes time, not water—a rebuke to our optimization overlords.

Take James Joyce, who once spent a working day futzing with two sentences. “You have been seeking the mot juste?” the painter Frank Budgen asked the Irish novelist on a stroll........

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