I know I still owe you part two on my findings at the psychedelic conference but I stumbled upon something worth sharing or at least writing about perhaps as it is a topic I have seen a fair amount on the old blog-o-sphere (as we used to call this place) and would you look at that; I have previously written about it too…

As you already know, dear followers of my blog, I have a few different formal writing pokers in the fire at present. I have been working on one in particular for most of the past several months (six I think) and as this is to be an article for academic submission I not only have to follow several rules for size and format, as journals are peer reviewed what I end up submitting will be scrutinized harshly prior to submission. Actually the peer review process is only one part of the scrutiny my article will go through. Once published the entirety of the academic world will have my article to (hopefully) use and cite for their own work but also to critique and criticize to their hearts content.

So not only a daunting task to get published but also, for me anyway, quite intimidating. As I am a person prone to procrastination anyway, I have found my mind drifting toward a book I completed in March 2023. It is certainly something to be proud of, completing a writing project north of 60,000 words, but what I have is the first draft and even before I finished the last chapter I had already decided the second edition would require a bit of reworking. Not a ground up rebuild but, and let’s be polite here and say, a lot of rewriting.

and somewhere on the top of that list of edits I need to complete was that I still did not have a working title for the book. When I originally came up with the idea for the book I actually conceptualized it as something I would publish here in my blog, it is in fact the reason I restarted and revamped my old blog to begin with.

That changed last week when, in a session with a patient, an idea emerged from my unconscious. I could title my book Building Your Self. I’m not sure I mentioned in my previous post on this subject but my book is on identity formation, so building your self seems rather fitting.

Anyway I digress…..

You also may recall I started playing with an AI art generation program called DALL-E2 and have posted some of my (or should it be our?) work here. Yes I could post a link to those articles here but alas I am lazy.

I thought I could, as a distraction yet still being productive, generate some AI art for my book. However when I opened the webpage I noticed that it had changed and now at my disposal, and begging for me to play with, was the now infamous ChatGBT program as well. Hmmm are the Fates allying for my fortune or merely tempting me?

I know my poetry has been infinitely more popular than my psychological rambling so I started there. For those who don’t know the way AI programs work is the human user (for now) types in a brief description of the desired output (with DALL-E2 these are known as prompts but with ChatGBT they are referred to as messages).

My first message, as my book was still on my mind, was ‘write a haiku about identity formation’ and what came out was actually quite good.

Layers intertwine,
Whispers of past and present,
Identity blooms.

Couple of critiques might start with the punctuation not traditionally being part of a haiku and the second line not being psychologically accurate or maybe it is just bothersome, but it is a technically accurate haiku in that it does follow the 5,7,5 format. While I will openly admit it is written in the modern style of haiku and not the traditional (which must be both about nature and tied in time to a particular season) it really is quite good. Certainly could be posted along my other haiku as I have also written in what my mother would refer to a loosie goosie with the rules format.

Then it hit me that part of what prompted my need to rewrite so much of my book came from the realization that a particular fairy tale could be psychoanalytically interpreted a particular way and I really only discussed that analysis in the introduction and need to carry that through the rest of the book for cohesion’s sake. I also recalled that when I originally came up with the analysis I went looking through the published materials for the interpretation someone else must have written by now. I am being purposefully vague in identifying the fairy tale as I said I have written a book….

As I usually do I think “surely someone must have” and then I go looking. I consider myself to be quite intelligent but I also know I am not the knower of all things nor am I the originator of all thought, so surely someone must have already written this analysis.

To my horror no one had.

I don’t know how other academic writers approach the discovery of a new topic or thought about a topic, but mine always goes something like, “Damn it…..” I literally have notebooks full of research I want to explore, and baskets full of 3×5 cards with research topics and notes scribbled upon them, I have even posted a few of those potential projects here on this blog, and in every journal I have ever written in. I have more than enough ideas to keep me locked in the basement in front of my Mac for the rest of multiple careers, let alone my own, and seriously the last thing I need is another idea. Yet with terrifying regularity I will come up with another one and when I look into the published works and find someone else has already written something on the subject I almost always feel relieved. Of course sometimes I find that person has, as an old professor used to say, made a complete hash of their effort, and then I find myself feeling more obligated to write something than relieved. I know, writer’s problems.

In this case there was no such relief, sweet or otherwise, so I seriously considered writing the analysis portion as a journal article before finishing my book. I was too consumed by the flames of creativity for my book so I chose not to go down that road, well yet anyway.

So I typed in a brief message to ChatGBT about my analysis idea and boom, out popped about 700 words of rather good analysis. I was overcome with a feeling of awe. This program had just, in a matter of SECONDS, written what appeared to be a well thought out and psychoanalytically astute article analyzing my fairy tale. The article included everything from an abstract to a conclusion and it appeared to only require some citations to be ready for me to submit for publication.

I finally understood what the fear and anger I had been reading about regarding AI generated work was all about. This stupid (and by stupid I mean brilliant) computer program had just put me out of a job.

sad face emoji

I had a brief conversation with my wife about it and she informed me she had used AI to generate outlines which she then uses as a basis for her own exploration in her writing. She doesn’t use the outline as is, nor does she publish it, but she does use it as more of a hint generator. To do any more than that she said, “would be cheating.”

Maybe I wasn’t out of a job. Maybe, like my wife, I could use this program in place of a conversation with a colleague or professor? I mean if I had contacted my dissertation chairwoman, for example, and told her what I was working on and she said have you thought of this or are you including that, I certainly wouldn’t accuse her of putting me out of work and I don’t think anyone would accuse me of cheating or plagiarizing her if I never cited that conversation in my work. My father used to refer to it as being a sounding board, or providing a springboard into one’s process to discuss a project with someone else and get their input.

I once saw an interview with the drummer for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Chad Smith, as part of a documentary for a group he was collaborating with, and he said the way the Peppers decided to handle song writing credit was to list everyone in the band as a writer. His argument was, “who knows what my dropping a stick on my (drum) kit unexpectedly added to a song or inspired a riff or beat change.” Creating music, at least for him and the Peppers, was a collaborative effort and rather than parse out who did what and when, they would just credit everyone equally. I believe other long lasting groups do the same.

So maybe working with AI could be an inspiration generating process or even a sort of collaborative process and not a their coming for our jobs sort of a thing at all.

Granted what was generated for me also lacked much of the requirements, for example the minimum length for many articles of this nature would be between 4,000 and 12,000 words which according to the protest I received from ChatGBT is beyond its capabilities, and the analysis upon further examination was not really at a academic level of most articles I have read I could see someone turning what was generated to a professor in an undergraduate course, and with very little changes.

At the risk of repeating my early post’s conclusion, it does not appear to me that AI is capable of replacing me in the academic writing circles, but I did wonder would it ever?

So I asked it. I typed into the ChatGBT, is AI eventually going to replace human creativity or investigative thought? and this is what it had to say on the subject…

(insert rant about WordPress no longer allowing one to cut and paste from Word directly into a post. Seriously what gives with that decision?)

An AI says–

So it would seem that AI does not believe it will be replacing us anytime soon and maybe my discovery of exporting a word document first to a .pdf and then two a .jpeg so that I didn’t have to retype the whole thing is an example of the out of the box thinking AI is just not currently capable of.

Of course computers have yet to be able to match the number of calculations per second a human brain can, but someday they will match and then surpass that limit and I suppose we will see what we will see at that time……

DALL-E2 Prompt: digital art of a super advanced computer system writing a research article

Update to my update:

Mrs. SoulDoc just pointed out that it is ChatGPT not ChatGBT which I had written too many times to want to go correct in this article. So my apologies to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and to all of you for my error.

I bet if an AI had written my article that mistake would not have been made……..