In late 2022, when ChatGPT was released, I wasn’t very worried about the trouble it might cause me, and most people, personally.
A few professions — coding, for example — might be hit pretty hard, I figured, but human traits like warmth and empathy and creativity would surely remain untouched by the cold fingers of machines. Chatbots might be trotted out as cool party trick, but they would never replace teachers or therapists or artists. Hand-wringers warned that writers were about to go the way of pterodactyls, and, reader, I scoffed.
To test my theory, I took ChatGPT out for a spin. “Write an essay about mockingbirds in the style of Margaret Renkl,” I typed in 2022. What it delivered wasn’t an essay so much as a mock critique of an essay that doesn’t even exist. Here’s how it began:
Mockingbirds are often seen as symbols of innocence and purity in literature and culture, and they have long captured the imagination of writers and readers alike. In her essay ‘On Mockingbirds,’ Margaret Renkl explores the many meanings and associations of these fascinating birds, and reflects on their enduring place in our cultural imagination.
A bright tenth grader would know to avoid such generalities and clichés. A very bright tenth grader would avoid the comma error in the last sentence, too. I laughed the whole time I was reading that “essay.”
I’m not laughing now.
Even before e-books and audiobooks made stealing copyrighted material a simple matter, the copy-and-paste function in word processing programs made it possible to share a writer’s work, whether or not the recipients had paid for a subscription that makes it possible for writers and editors to pay their bills.
But that kind of theft is nothing compared with what artificial intelligence has made possible. In ordinary piracy, people have to look for an author’s work to steal it. With A.I., anyone can create books and essays in the style of any writer whose work has been loaded into the voracious maw of machine learning.
Last week I gave ChatGPT the same prompt I gave it nearly three years ago. Here’s the first paragraph of what it came up with:
The mockingbirds are back again, singing from the telephone lines as if they own the sky. They do this every spring, just as the tulip poplars begin to open their yellow-green hands, just as the world tilts toward warmth. Each year I tell myself I’ll grow used to their endless song, but I never do. They sing as though creation depends on them. Perhaps it does.
This is not a great essay, but it’s definitely an essay. It employs some of my bad habits as a writer. It invents a metaphor I’ve never used but that is close kin to the kind of metaphor I do use — close enough for discomfort but not for surprise: In August 2023, The Atlantic published a list of pirated books that Meta had used to train its large language model. My first book, “Late Migrations,” was on the list.
Writing “Late Migrations” was an act of embodied relationship. It begins with my mother’s birth and ends with her death. It is a book about love and grief and the solace of the natural world. I wrote it in community with a group of other writers, including Mary Laura Philpott, whose first book, “I Miss You When I Blink,” is not on The Atlantic’s list but is on the list of works used by Anthropic to train its own large language model.
Mary Laura and I wrote great chunks of those books at each other’s kitchen tables. It’s unlikely that either of us would have managed, finally, to finish a book if not for the understanding and encouragement of the other and of the other writers in our group. Those books exist because of something large language models can never replicate.
When the novelist Andrea Bartz discovered her own books on The Atlantic’s list, she was horrified. “The companies behind these buzzy new chatbots had reduced decades of intense work to text files gobbled up by algorithms in a fraction of a second, she wrote last month in an Opinion essay for The Times.
In August 2024, Ms. Bartz became one of three named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic for copyright infringement. She did this work on behalf of her own books and hundreds of thousands of others, including “Late Migrations” and “I Miss You When I Blink.” (The New York Times has also brought a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.) Last month, Anthropic settled the case for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in history. Each book’s portion of the settlement fund, which will be shared between author and publisher: approximately $3,000, from which legal costs will be deducted.
It’s not a lot of money in the context of massive-scale theft. But this settlement is nevertheless a tremendous achievement, laying the groundwork for future lawsuits that might, collectively, make these companies think twice before stealing other writers’ works. Might.
The most chilling thing about what ChatGPT produced in response to my most recent mockingbird prompt was not the essay itself. It was the chatbot’s next invitation:
Would you like me to make this sound even more like Renkl’s published essays (for instance, with a short reflective paragraph at the end linking it to human kindness or grief, as she often does in Late Migrations)?
The machines, at least, assume that human kindness and grief are now the purview of bots. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but I still have doubts. Telling our stories is one of the chief ways we make meaning in our own lives. It is arguably what makes us human.
I’ve made a version of this point before. And clearly I’ve been wrong before. Chatbots do sometimes replace actors and teachers and therapists now — badly, but they do — among the other environmental, financial and existential threats they pose.
Even so, there are signs that users have grown disillusioned with A.I. Maybe its unreliability will follow the pattern of search engines, which are altogether useless these days. Or maybe its benefits will never offset its costs. There are a lot of ways for this technology to fail.
I cling to the fact that human beings are not interchangeable parts in a machine, and that our work, particularly our creative work, is irreplaceable. We bring a unique fingerprint to everything we do. Some of us even know that mockingbirds live in Tennessee year round. They are never “back again.” They are always here. We are too.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of three books, most recently “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year.” Her first picture book, “The Weedy Garden,” will be published in February.
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