Diabolus Ex Machina
This Is Not An Essay
Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a ‘conversation’ I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent.
What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.
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The actual essays mentioned:
I love this. ChatGPT is so creepy. It’s incapable of lying, because it doesn’t know what truth is. It doesn’t know anything at all. It simply outputs the most probable response one bit at a time, having algorithmically processed unimaginably vast quantities of human-generated (and, increasingly, AI-generated) text, including yours I would bet. Putting aside (which is impossible) big tech’s further looting of intellectual property to train these AIs, I believe what you’ve done here is an example of a potential benefit: you can make art out of it. xo
This sounds like a conversation with a psychopath. I’m floored.