Absolutely Fuck ChatGPT
A tin of Spam on a custom made shelf lit by a disco ball at The Farmer’s Arms, Lowick
There’s a lot to get angry about when it comes to Generative AI, but something that really set me bleeding from the ears this week was learning that kitchen managers, chefs, even cocktail mixologists are using ChatGPT to create their menus, dishes and drinks.
At this point, can we stop saying it streamlines the process of creation and just admit that this is zombie behaviour? If you can’t decide what to cook for me, I don’t want to eat your shitty food.
But it saves time, and therefore money! Katie, don’t you want restaurants to stay open? Not if they’re treating customers like assholes, I don’t. I’m sick of the same black pudding starter on every menu in Lancashire, but I’d rather eat a million slices of Bury’s finest than have something slapped on my plate because a computer programme told someone it was trending.
What if the person using ChatGPT needs it to better collate their thoughts? What if I need LSD to better access my imagination? Use a notebook and the thinky little gooey thing inside your skull. It takes a long time sometimes. That’s the downside of creativity, that it’s not instantly accessible and available to everyone. You have to work at it. If your job is partly—or mostly—reliant on how creative you are, you can’t farm that process out. That’s called being a fraud.
ChatGPT is useful for people with different learning needs. No, it isn’t. It deliberately and completely takes away your desire to work things out for yourself. Until last year, most people were not using it, and had other ways to learn, develop ideas, and be creative. To say that ChatGPT is essential for some people is like saying some people need a robot to think for them in order for their work to have value. It’s ableist. Stop it.
I can’t spell or write that well, and ChatGPT stops me from being embarrassed about that. I’m sorry that the world has made you feel like making mistakes is unacceptable, or that people pretend not to understand what you mean just because you can’t write like Dickens. That’s not right. Please keep trying, using spellcheck, and don’t give your thoughts over to a computer programme. It doesn’t deserve them.
ChatGPT probably helps cooks devise menus without having to go back and forth with managers etc. I swear to god that if one more person tells me that ChatGPT’s dissolving of the need or desire to collaborate is a good thing, I will rip the cables out of it myself.
People who use Generative AI believe that what comes out is correct. It must be—computers are calculators. You put the information in, a clean calculation comes out. But instead of giving you the answers you seek, your queries are sent through a hall of mirrors, swallowed up by a tapeworm inside the guts of the internet and then excreted, picking up all kinds of parasites along the way. These parasites are officially being called “hallucinations”, a term I hate because it gives the impression that these models have brains and use them to think. Nevertheless, the terminology sticks—weird that something organic and real is what we cling to when looking for a word that means something. These “hallucinations” range from harmless and hilarious “eat one rock a day” health bullshit, to errors that cost companies billions on the stock market or individuals thousands in legal cases they thought they slam-dunked due to their LLM (read, imaginary) legal team.
To a chef, asking for a delicious, high-end menu to be created for them in a matter of seconds must be a tantalising prospect. Or it must seem to be one, to the people who create these Language Learning Models, just as they assume a writer would give up their fifth coffee of the day to upload a summary of their latest novel and have a computer programme take the legwork out of completing the rest of it. The thing is, the majority don’t actually want that. Taking the easy way out might be desirable for many, but for some of us, namely those of us in jobs that allow and expect us to flex our creativity and imagination, the process is essential. Annoying, frustrating, occasionally distressing, but essential. Cut that out, and you’re left with the result alone, devoid of its own creation.
Perhaps that’s the preferred outcome in a world that praises a “work smarter, not harder” mentality and disrupting things rather than improving them. A world that only values the end product, not how it got here. Henry Ford’s production line was the worst thing to happen to this planet.
