Ho chiesto a ChatGPT di scrivere una pagina del mio romanzo
A writer discusses their experience asking ChatGPT to write a page of their novel, expressing disappointment that the AI output was too polished and well-written. They reflect on how appreciating technical craft requires personal experience with the work involved, comparing it to understanding musical technique.
Summary
The speaker recounts an experiment where they asked ChatGPT to write a single page of a novel they were working on for pleasure. Upon reading the result, they experienced disappointment—not because it was bad, but because it was exceptional and identical in quality to their own writing. This prompted reflection on the nature of appreciation and technical mastery. The speaker emphasizes that they can recognize and value the AI's output specifically because they have invested significant personal effort into their own writing process: spending days on individual pages, carefully refining adjectives, removing unnecessary adverbs, and rethinking punctuation choices. They draw an analogy to musicianship, noting that high-level musicians can fully appreciate the incredible technique and inventiveness behind a complex piece precisely because they understand the technical demands involved. The speaker concludes that truly appreciating and understanding the power of technology requires direct knowledge of it—one must know what the work entails to grasp the achievement. Without that experiential foundation, someone unfamiliar with writing cannot fully comprehend the complexity of what ChatGPT has accomplished, limiting their ability to recognize the significance of the technological achievement.
Key Insights
- The speaker was disappointed by ChatGPT's output not because it was poor but because it was too good and indistinguishable from their own writing
- The speaker's appreciation of the AI output is informed by personal experience spending days refining single pages through careful adjective selection, adverb removal, and punctuation revision
- Only high-level practitioners in a discipline can fully understand the incredible technique and inventiveness behind expert work in that field
- One's ability to appreciate technology's power is directly proportional to personal knowledge and experience with the work that technology replaces
- Someone who has never written a page cannot grasp the complexity of what an AI writing tool accomplishes, limiting their ability to recognize the achievement
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] It happened to me in one of the things I wrote, that is for pleasure, therefore the novels, to have GPT chat write a page, just a page like Divertisman. And when I read it I was really disappointed [laughter] because it was too good, because it was fantastic. He was identical to you. Okay, but I know I appreciated it not only because I know my way of writing, [0:31] but because I spent days on a page to write, smoothing out the adjective, removing the adverb, rethinking the punctuation. It's a bit like, musician friends I talk to often tell me , it's obvious that only if you're a high-level musician do you fully understand [clears throat]…
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