Dear Readers: A lot of professional writers are freaking out about ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot created by the OpenAI foundation that can generate essays, novels, screenplays—any kind of writing—faster than living/breathing/typing/revising human beings ever could. What’s more, enter the name of any writer, living or dead, and within seconds ChatGPT can spit out an essay or a screenplay or an opinion column in the style of that writer.
Or an advice column in the style of a particular advice columnist.
My name came up on a recent episode of “Hard Fork,” a podcast on new technologies from the New York Times. During a discussion about the good, bad, and ugly of ChatGPT, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton—both longtime Savage Lovecast listeners—speculated openly (flagrantly! shamelessly!) about whether ChatGPT could do my job. After listening to “Hard Fork” (which sounds like it should be a euphemism for something), and after seeing other writers freaking out about AI chatbots stealing their jobs, I decided to see whether I needed to worry.
I pulled a letter from the Savage Love inbox—something, low, slow, and over-the-plate—went to the ChatGPT website (www.openai.com), and asked ChatGPT to “answer this question in the style of Dan Savage’s advice column.” So, can the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot really do a better job giving sex advice than I do? We’re about to find out. Here’s the question I chose…
Click here to read the rest of this week’s Mini Savage Love (free-to-all) – and see if you can guess which answers are his and which are ChatGPT!
