Feb 12, 2023

Dumbledore’s 'Pensive' and Harry’s Patronus are hallmarks of the fathomless depths of the human mind. Everything else is just a facsimile. Author of the article: Article content REGISTER TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors or If you are a Home delivery print subscriber, unlimited online access is included in your subscription. Activate your Online Access Now Article content Try refreshing your browser, or Westover: Chatbots will democratize writing, never replace it Back to video That was my first thought when I read about Chat GPT in late 2022. Of course, when a skillset is tied to your livelihood, you tend to go worst-case scenario. Ottawa Citizen Headline News Email Address Sign Up By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. You may unsubscribe any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails or any newsletter. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300 Thanks for signing up! A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Ottawa Citizen Headline News will soon be in your inbox. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again Article content Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or shuttling to space on an entrepreneurial rocket, you’ve likely heard of this open source application with magical possibilities not revealed since Harry Potter burst onto the scene. And yet, it’s precisely because of the brilliance of the wizarding world itself that my initial fears were tamed. But I’ll come back to that. As someone who writes for a living, I never give much thought to the extemporaneous writing that life requires. Bad service? I write a letter. Exceptional service? Ditto. Mishandled insurance claim? Fire off a missive. Concern at my daughter’s school? Whip up an e-mail. Bank trouble? You’ll hear from me. Advertisement 3 Article content My ease with the written word gives me daily advantages I’ve taken for granted. Imagine arriving in this country with English as a second, or even third language, and struggling to make the complexity of your thoughts known, with access to only limited vocabulary. Or what about the brilliant carpenter, whose hands tell a beautiful story, but whose words are clumsy? Levelling the communication playing field in day-to-day interactions and workaday communications is inclusivity in action. I wonder if there was a similar furor when the calculator hit the mainstream? Were mathematicians gnashing their teeth, worried that years toiling in obscurity, solving for X, were all for naught as the masses got their hands on this tiny tool of democratization? Maybe. Advertisement 4 Article content But they needed not fear. Having a calculator at the ready means folks like me can ascertain quickly how much we’ll save if an item is 35 per cent off. But its invention was never going to make the rest of us into Good Will Hunting. School is a bit trickier, because the art of the essay has been a central tenet of high school and post-secondary education since time immemorial. It’s a means to demonstrate that you can not only consume and synthesize information, but that you can package your thoughts into a nuanced and original interpretation. Educators need to teach to the technology, informing kids they are aware of its existence, and its limitations. How about an assignment assessing the app’s strengths and weaknesses, challenging the assumption that AI knows best? Advertisement 5 Article content Bright young minds are already turning the software on its head, developing an app to identify text written by Chat GPT … so just as quickly as a new platform evolves, a new way to manage it sprouts up. Some people will always be prone to cheating, but in the case of plagiarism, you’re stealing from your own potential, and that’s the message to those students seeking shortcuts. Besides, if we really want to home in on the value of original thought, we can offer exams on paper (gasp!). Maybe one day we’ll be able to channel the wisdom of the universe through a good ol’ orange HB pencil, but until then, universities could always consider a closed room and a ruled notebook. It’s normal to be leery of new technologies, because they always cut both ways. The good news is that Harry Potter wasn’t written by an algorithm or an open source code, but rather by a stressed single mom banging out her dream in the local coffee shop. Dumbledore’s “Pensive” and Harry’s Patronus are hallmarks of the fathomless depths of the human mind. Everything else is just a facsimile. I guess that’s why they call it AI. As long as humans think, writing will be very much alive. Suzanne Westover is an Ottawa writer, not a chatbot.