I also asked it to pretend that it was Prince Harry. The results? Illuminating.
Like every columnist on Earth, I’ve been using generative AI to toy around with column ideas.
Here’s how we do it. We login to chatGPT3. We ask it a question, like: “What is the best advice on how to keep one’s New Year’s writing and reading resolutions?” We watch, speechless, as it provides really quite solid guidance in less time than it takes to warm up a cup of tea in the microwave. We take the tea out to the stoep and sip it slowly, staring at nothing in particular, questioning our life choices.
Some weeks before this exercise, knowing that the AI storm was coming, I decided to adopt, as a safety measure, a symbol to indicate when writing was free from the input of our new robot sages. I chose the Japanese kanji , pronounced “won”, meaning “porcelain bowl” or “teacup”. The symbol gestures toward artistic endeavour on a human scale: bowls are integral to the art of kintsugi, “golden joinery”, which is an apt description of how writing works; and teacups are linked to the wabi-sabi aesthetic, which calls for an appreciation of the beauty found in imperfection.
I’ve published a few imperfect items since then with pasted at the bottom, to reassure readers that AI had no part in their creation. There’s a strange satisfaction in making this doubtless futile last stand against the onslaught of the machines.
I won’t be using the symbol for this column, however, because, as I mentioned, the advice that chatGPT spat out like so much tobacco juice is worth sharing in full.
Before getting to it, however, I thought I should share that I also asked chatGPT to pretend that it was “Prince Harry of the Windsor family of the UK”, and that it should “write the opening paragraph of your memoir, which you have entitled ‘Spare’”.
Now, bear in mind that AI has very little knowledge of the world before 2021 – that is, long before the real Prince Harry’s now-bestselling bombshell of a memoir was announced. Here is, nevertheless, what SussexGPT produced:
“Growing up as the spare heir to the British throne, I never could have imagined the weight of expectation and responsibility that would come with my birthright. From a young age, I was aware of my role within the royal family and the impact that it would have on my ...