On ChatGPT

Will's thoughts on ChatGPT, and why it won't replace him (hopefully)

Announcement: We hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter. It’s slightly different because we’re working hard on a surprise for next week. The Served Supper Club is hitting the road! And trying out new forms of content! Stay tuned 🐟

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Hi Everyone -

How are y’all doing? Happy Wednesday. It’s me. Will. Let me share what’s on my mind.

I’m on one side of this relationship. Writing. And you’re on the other side. Reading. Sometimes I wonder which of us has it better. Every week I reach further into the recesses of my mind. Digging for a dusty thought or ripe memory. Toiling over every keystroke. Trying. Re-trying. Doing. Re-doing. Creating. Deleting. Creating again.

Every week, you receive the fruits of my labor. Delivered piping hot, fresh to your inbox (typically) on Monday mornings. The sentences are plated for your reading pleasure, and the paragraphs are perfectly seasoned. Substack, my excellent server, carries the words to you during just the right moment in your morning routine. Pop some bread in the toaster, pour yourself a steaming cup of joe, and crack open the latest edition of the Served Supper Club. It’s all part of a balanced breakfast.

Wouldn’t it be nice, you think, for our dearest Will to enjoy the sweet bliss of readership? To eat instead of to cook? To receive instead of to give? If only! If only there was some way to make my words appear from thin air. That way I could toast my bread, drink my coffee, and read my own writing with the rest of you. Maybe that’s what heaven looks like?

“Will,” you think. “Will,” you’re practically shrieking! “Haven’t you heard of large language models? Don’t you think generative AI is the future? You should totally have ChatGPT write your newsletter for you!”

I love all of my readers very much, and I genuinely appreciate each and every suggestion that I receive. ChatGPT comes up more than most - and it has always made me feel a little bit weird. This is my grappling with that feeling. And my explanation for why I will never have ChatGPT write even a single letter of the Served Supper Club newsletter.

For those of you that might not know, ChatGPT is an AI language model that, after being trained on all of the data available on the internet prior to September 2021, is able to generate pretty darn good responses to text queries. I just recently returned from a Summit in San Francisco where Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and Silicon Valley deity, was the keynote speaker. I’ll admit to drinking the AI Kool-Aid a bit. Generative AI has the potential to be genuinely revolutionary across a ton of different use cases. Like summarizing notes, or generating interview guides. Et cetera.

Creative, narrative-based writing is just not one such use case. These models by definition are trained using stuff that already exists. Words that people already wrote. Sure, an LLM can create novel sentences and even hallucinate imaginary scenarios - but it just outputs a semantically coherent, and grammatically correct smoothie of what it found in its training data. Blended together using next-word probabilities and overly-blunt ethical guidelines. That’s not super interesting reading to me.

To me there’s something inherently valuable about the unique human experiences that go into writing words. Into generating the training data itself. With Served, there’s a trip to a new restaurant, a conversation with an awesome server or restaurant owner, delicious food, memories made with friends. Hopefully that energy, that emotion, that reality comes through sometimes in my writing. I toil over every keystroke. Try. Re-try. Do. Re-do. Create. Delete. Create again.

I don’t regurgitate. I don’t summarize. I don’t sanitize.

When you read my writing, you’re getting me - and I hope you enjoy it.

You might disagree. You might think I don’t know anything about AI. Let me know in the comments 🙂. We’re going to Shukette on June 4th to get us back onto waiter favorites.

See you next week - with some very new, very exciting content,

Will