ChatGPT Draws the Minotaur and a Whale
Two years ago, I sat on my older brother’s floor and played with an AI image generator. I told it to create an image of a ceiling fan and refreshed it over and over, laughing at the grotesque spider-creatures it created. My brother told me to focus, and I went back to helping him draw a whale for his project on Moby Dick.
Last year, my friend asked me to proofread an essay on The Tempest for English class. “Since you like Shakespeare,” he explained. The essay was somewhat well-written, if disjointed, but I stopped when I came to a quote. “I don’t think he said that,” I said, pulling out my copy. “The use of ‘thou’ doesn’t seem right. I can go over this act with you in study hall, if you want—I don’t think you’re quite understanding the language.” He shook his head and told me that the essay had been written by AI. He’d wanted to know if it was obvious that something was wrong. “It says Act VI on this citation,” I joked.
Last week, I had to write an email to my college’s creative journal asking for clarification on a submission rule. I violently hate writing emails, and for good reason. I’m terrible at them. My mother, who is a teacher, shrugged when I asked for advice. “Just use ChatGPT,” she suggested. “I have a coworker who has it write all her emails. You’d never notice.” I wrote the email myself. It took me an hour.
In the course of a few years, AI has gone from a joke to a tool. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you its usefulness. It can generate prompts, ideas, entire essays. Never do homework again with this one simple trick. Never write again. It frightens me. I just finished a short story yesterday. It took me months to write it, and I’ve edited it four times over the past two years. When I compare it now to the original, I’m floored. I can see exactly where I’ve improved, what skills I’ve gained. To me, that story is so much more than what it is. It is a roadmap of how I’ve grown, how I’ve changed. It shows off all my quirks, all the things that make my writing mine—subordinate clauses, intrusive narration, twisted clichés, far too many em dashes. It is a journey, not a destination. That is what writing should always be.
AI is a crippling blow to so much, it seems. To English classes, for a start. I have to write an essay on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart this month. With AI, it would take me maybe an hour. I’ve spent an hour on it, brainstorming. I have no essay to show for it, no destination, but I have a million new ideas, new journeys. A blank page, yes, but an honest one. A blank page that is mine. Maybe the girl sitting next to me is going to use AI. I’d never know, with how well AI can hide itself now. The last time I proofread an AI essay, I didn’t notice.
But AI hurts so much more. I looked up the plural of taxidermy yesterday, for that short story. The AI search result, now at the top of my browser whether I like it or not, gleefully told me the plural was taxidermists. Wrong. It then explained that taxidermist was a different word from taxidermy. Do people really even read this crap? I thought. I had to scroll through a couple of online dictionaries before I found an answer, but along the way I found some pictures of a goofy stuffed bear to send my taxidermist friend. Next to me at lunch today, one of my friends searched something, read only the AI result, and put her phone down. I can’t help but feel sorry for her. There’s a good chance what she read was wrong, to start, but she lost the journey as well. The art of the rabbit hole is dying.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost even myself to AI, in how everyone else has. There’s a specific style that bots like ChatGPT like to write in, apparently, and it can be hard to clock. The best way I’ve learned to find it is when everyone sounds exactly the same. That same toneless drone for serious topics; that bouncy customer-service-how-can-I-help-you-today? filler that permeates casual articles. Nobody breaks grammar rules, nobody overuses em dashes, nobody sounds like themselves. Nobody is unique. I can brush it aside, ignore the AI paragraphs and write them off as not my concern, but then I see posts online about how only AI uses specific words that humans, of course, don’t. Insight, delve, underscore, showcase, journey. All words I love and use. AI is taking the individuality of people like me and spreading it to the world in regurgitated half-plagiarisms until it owns what words were once ours, and we become the imitators. When I saw journey on that list, I panicked. I’m going to get accused of using it, I thought. This is what I get for trying to twist a cliché.
All my life, I’ve been taught that it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. It gets thrown around on road trips, during lengthy projects—basically any long or multi-step process that annoys children. I’m fairly certain an episode of Teen Titans GO! I saw in elementary school even ended with it. I always thought it was kind of stupid. The destination is where you’re going, your end goal. It matters. It’s practically the definition of the word. There is no journey without it. I only started to understand after AI.
That short story I keep mentioning—it’s about Theseus and the Minotaur. It was some dumb assignment that everybody else barely tried on: “Write a story with elements of fear.” I really hated my English teacher that year, so I tried to deliberately break as much of her advice as possible. Non-linear storytelling, changing point of views, the works. I remembered all her favorite short stories from throughout the year and all the parts she loved and broke them too. The hero didn’t get the girl, the genre wasn’t fantasy, the descriptions were disgustingly graphic and gory, and the ending wasn’t happily ever after. My destination was angry English teacher. My journey was the best thing I’ve ever written. (I didn’t reach my destination. She loved it, told me I had huge potential, and gave me a 100. I proceeded to write an essay on how the events of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” one of her favorites, never happened because the narrator was just experiencing lead poisoning from the house’s walls. That got the destination.)
With AI, that story wouldn’t have happened. I’d have had no journey. I would’ve ended up with Theseus delving into the labyrinth, showcasing insights into the hero’s journey that came from someone else’s story churned through algorithms into its most basic pieces. A destination, alone. Who cares if the destination is correct, even—AI went viral a few months ago for telling people to eat rocks. There are two taxidermy pieces in my friend’s bedroom right now—sorry, I meant there are two taxidermists in my friend’s room.
Writing and learning teach us that it is the journey that matters, not the destination. The getting there, the process. My literature professor doesn’t care if I know about the use of parables in Things Fall Apart. He wants me to think about how pieces of stories fit together to convey bigger ideas. He wants me to recognize and respect ways different cultures teach their values. My sophomore English teacher didn’t want to read 50 clumsy horror stories. She wanted us to learn what sentence structures evoke which emotions. She wanted us to be able to convey our emotions and ideas clearly. I do want to know the plural of taxidermy, but I also want to know which sites will give me that information the fastest, which use British spellings, which are insufferable from all the ads. By looking it up, I learned the plural of taxidermy, and I learned where to go next time. If I had stopped at the AI result, I would have neither. AI is inhuman, impersonal. Writing and learning teach us to trust the process. They foster our creativity, our individuality, our perseverance. AI fosters our impatience. AI teaches us that it’s the destination that matters, not the journey. That the destination doesn’t matter, so long as there is no journey.
I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how we go back to bad essays and bad emails and bad drawings of whales. I don’t know how we forget the destination and revel again in the journey. My friend, one grade beneath me, showed me her project on Moby Dick today. The images were AI-generated. “I don’t know how to draw a whale,” she said.