Will ChatGPT Kill Content Creation?
My experience using the chatbot to write this blog post.
For the past few months, I’ve been reading surveys of history and philosophy. I read both books chronologically, so I get two perspectives on the same historical events. The beginning includes the Greek philosophers and poets, which inspired me to write a blog post to connect Greek pre-Socratic philosophy and art--namely, Homer’s Iliad. Since I read the Iliad twice, I felt informed enough to draw connections.
ChatGPT was released a couple of days ago. Reading the results on Twitter and LinkedIn amazed me. Could this be the end of original content? I already had an outline of what I wanted to write about, but I decided to experiment. If I could accurately describe the topic and purpose of the post to the chatbot, I could compare it to what I had already written. But would the result be similar?
Initial Prompt
First, let’s see what ChatGPT would write based on the prompt: “Write a blog post on the philosophy of the Iliad.”
The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, which tells the story of the ten-year Trojan War and the events leading up to it. At its core, the poem is a meditation on the nature of war and its effects on the individuals who fight in it.
The Iliad presents war as a destructive force that has the power to shatter lives and tear apart communities. The poem shows the devastating impact of war on the city of Troy, as well as on the individual soldiers who fight in it. The characters in the poem struggle with the brutality and futility of war, and many of them are ultimately destroyed by it.
One of the most striking aspects of the Iliad is the way it portrays the warriors who fight in the Trojan War. The poem presents these warriors not as heroic figures, but as flawed and fallible human beings. The heroes of the poem are often shown to be petty, vengeful, and driven by their own desires for glory and revenge.
At the same time, however, the Iliad also shows the warriors as being capable of great courage and nobility. The poem presents the warriors as individuals who are willing to face death in order to defend their loved ones and their honor. In this way, the Iliad suggests that, even in the midst of the horrors of war, it is possible for individuals to exhibit virtues such as bravery and self-sacrifice.
One of the most famous scenes in the Iliad is the confrontation between the warrior Achilles and the Trojan prince Hector. In this scene, Hector challenges Achilles to a duel and is ultimately killed by him. This encounter serves as a microcosm of the Trojan War, as it shows the futility and destructiveness of war.
In the end, the Iliad presents a complex and nuanced view of war and its effects on individuals. The poem suggests that war is a destructive force that can shatter lives and tear apart communities, but it also shows that, in the midst of war, individuals can exhibit great courage and nobility.
Strikingly, ChatGPT emphasizes the characteristics of the mortal heroes of the epic and omits a whole set of characters: the Olympian gods. The analysis of the effects of war seems trite. I would cast this in a different light and refer to Achilles’s hubris, which is popularly described as excessive pride but is exhibited by Achilles as blindness to reason. At one point, his companion Patroclus is slain, and even though his compatriot Odysseus advocates for moderation, Achilles embraces an emotional, vengeful attitude. Achilles is fated to die should he retaliate by killing Hector. So the battle shows the destructiveness of war and Achilles’ willingness to cut his life short and avenge Patroclus.
The poem characterizes heroes as pursuing kleos (fame and glory). Achilles has a choice to live a meaningful life by virtuously pursuing achievement or a nominal one, and he chooses the former even though he knows it will be shorter. This presents a view of life that promotes individual achievement despite the risks: Achilles for vengeance and Hector for the love of his country.
The chatbot claims the duel between Achilles and Hector displays the futility and destructiveness of war. I believe both warriors thought their battle had a purpose, as do the countries they represent. It’s meaningful to point out that the origin of the war was Helen, Queen of Sparta, eloping with Paris to Troy. Her husband, Menelaus, led an expedition to retrieve her, which resulted in bloodshed. But the chatbot response withholds that.
Olympian Gods
I tried to elicit a different response from ChatGPT, so I reran the prompt and received a paragraph related to the Olympian gods.
Additionally, the Iliad explores the idea of fate and the role it plays in human lives. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods had control over their fates, and the characters in the Iliad often refer to their own fates being controlled by the gods. This belief in fate is one of the reasons why the characters in the Iliad, particularly Achilles, are willing to accept their own deaths, as they believe it is their fate to do so.
Saying that the gods controlled fate is interesting because, occasionally, in the Iliad, Zeus will use his scale to determine the outcome of an event. This means even the gods must bend to some will or fate. Perhaps the role of fate is less clear due to Homer’s inconsistencies.
To fill in more historical details: in ancient Greece, philosophy grew as an opposition to mythic thinking and was driven by the desire to find explanations. The Greeks saw the unpredictable irregularities of nature and hypothesized the gods were responsible. The Homeric epic presented the gods as fallible with human characteristics; the only defining qualities were immortality and immense strength. The gods are depicted quarreling with one another and the mortal world below. Their arguments rarely considered man’s interests, nor did they represent a moral ideal for man to emulate. This was expressive of Greek’s political landscape in the 8th century BC. In Homer’s time, there was no conception of a body of law by which the rulers must abide. That led to haphazard decision-making based on nobles, warriors, and the public’s opinion. In this respect, the gods were modeled after mortal rulers.
Fate was imbued in ancient Greek culture. Achilles accepted the result of his action against Hector because of this.
Chatbot Conclusions
Using ChatGPT, I quickly discovered critical limitations. Suppose you submit a prompt asking for the best time to vacation in a particular country when tourism is low, and the weather is adequate. In that case, it will respond with an error explaining it doesn’t have access to the internet or any real-time data. However, it will cleverly give you a highly-rated, gluten-free brownie recipe that could be easily searched for. It’s still a valuable way to retrieve information conversationally as if you were asking HAL 9000. (Bad example?)
I see generative AI as an aid to human cognition, not a replacement. We still need people to train the system. But, the language process aspect is a fascinating thing for me. I could be vague, and the chatbot's response would expound on the topic. It felt like it genuinely understood certain concepts; however, the responses were based on the massive, diverse dataset from which it was trained.
Nevertheless, I’ve already found so many uses for ChatGPT. I’ve been using it to create simple email and message response templates and the email footer for this Substack!
Sources
Iliad by Homer
“A History of Western Philosophy: The Classical Mind” by W. T. Jones
“The Columbia History of the World” by John A. Garraty and Peter Gay
Cover DALL·E image: “Chatbot reading ancient literature, oil painting“