Was It Written by ChatGPT, or by a Novelist?

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To the Editor:

Re “An Experiment in Lust, Regret and Kissing,” by Curtis Sittenfeld (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 1):

As Ms. Sittenfeld noted, ChatGPT is fast but soulless; it writes toneless prose. As my college writing professor told us, unending descriptions are dull. Ms. Sittenfeld’s writing deftly blends description with lots of conversation, something that ChatGPT cannot do well easily.

One more reason that ChatGPT is soulless is that it has no idea what it is writing about. It’s really just an algorithm for stringing together linguistic patterns that it has indexed over the whole internet. Being a good pattern matcher is an accomplishment, but it’s a long way from matching human creativity.

ChatGPT does not know whether anything it writes actually corresponds to the real world because it has no knowledge of the real world beyond the patterns it picks up from the internet. It doesn’t know that the sentence “my cat is green” could not be true (unless I painted my cat green).

And, alas, that huge internet database includes work that is copyrighted. So I share Ms. Sittenfeld’s disgust in the way her work was used without compensation.

Candy Sidner
Newton, Mass.
The writer is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of A.I. and of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

To the Editor:

I enjoyed your piece pitting Curtis Sittenfeld against ChatGPT in a beach-read showdown. However, while entertaining, it was like asking a chef to make her favorite dish while telling a novice cook to “do something with tofu” — then acting surprised when the meal was bland. The prompt given to ChatGPT was flavorless. By neglecting to optimize prompting techniques, you inadvertently asked the A.I. to generate generic, inoffensive content based on minimal input.