My Nemesis

Ihave a nemesis, but I can’t seem to stay away. It’s like middle school* all over again, facing this absolute villain every day, trying to say the right words while my enemy has no such compunctions. I want to scream, but it won’t change a thing.

I am speaking, of course, of ChatGPT.

I don’t find ChatGPT especially useful when it comes to writing. It’s handy for a throwaway, “Hey, can you name this character?” or “Would this character make bail in New York State?” (It was for a story, I promise.) But the writing itself is mechanical and cliché, and I’m developing an allergy for reading it, let alone presenting it as my own.

What’s useful is when I’m building up a mystery and looking for authentic sources to back up my clues. ChatGPT can scan, translate, and link me to stories or odd historical anecdotes based on my vague recollections of a lighthouse keeper here, a Victorian gardening tip there… it’s handy, about 30 percent of the time.

The other 70 percent, it’s an outrageous liar. “Hey, what’s the basis for this fact about a 19th-century post office cat?” I ask, struggling to make my obscure reveal work, and it fumbles over a travel diary that doesn’t exist until I give up and hunt it down in the classic way: aggressive googling, a library archive that my card lets me access, and actually paying for an old newspaper article. When I tell ChatGPT that I found the story in an 1894 railway almanac, it’s very complimentary. “Nice catch!” it says, and goes on to quote a completely invented almanac entry, featuring “Captain Picklethorpe.”