Writing for health

Writing for health: or, yielding our well-being to ChatGPT and AI

Rimini, Antica Cafeteria, Piazza Tre Martiri / 23 April 2023

Dear Editor,

            Thank you for all the recent posts on ChatGPT, OpenAI, and yet another acronym: LLM — Large Language Models. Since you have stated, more than once, that “the humanities are the guardians of language,” I think these posts are relevant. But why have you yourself remained silent? “Chat” got your tongue?

            Let me propose a simple argument or rather observation: that writing is among the best — and simplest! — means for cultivating health; and that therefore, as a corollary, any instrument or technology that inhibits writing — such as ChatGPT — prevents good health, and contributes to our ongoing malaise.

            This claim — writing for health — may appear bizarre, or at least a stretched and thin argument, or perhaps, yet again, a desperate attempt to make the humanities matter. “Have we not heard enough,” some might say, “about soft skills? Now the humanities want to encumber us with the far-fetched notion that writing supports health!”

            There is no one answer to this objection. A Chinese master might respond, “Write every day for one hundred days and and then affirm or deny the claim” (calligraphy and poetry were among the five excellences cultivated in Chinese tradition). In other words, without practice, it is simple to affirm or deny in the abstract, apodictically, any assertion.

            Yet the irony is that most people will not try something unless persuaded to do so, by arguments from authority, from logic, or other people’s experience. So there is little chance of establishing the claim, “writing promotes health,” without further testimony, reasoning, or evidence.

            I begin with the negative corollary, that subverting writing undermines health. We live in a world dominated, apparently, by technology (I say “apparently,” since we permit such dominance); ChatGPT becomes an extension of its sway. “Artificial intelligence” has been with us for many years, by our side in our daily tasks, our investments, indeed our healthcare system. Why then this caution against using it in the task of writing, when it increases the speed of completing the task?

            One argument, often repeated, is the ChatGPT can be inaccurate: it gathers and repeats falsehoods. To my way of thinking, this is only a sign of a deeper issue, that the chatbot collates statements without any notion of inwardness, since inwardness is a human quality, and one that ChatGPT leads us to neglect. One reads essays from ChatGPT and misses — or should miss — personality. By “personality” I don’t intend to say charm, or charisma, or cleverness. Dorothy Parker had all three, or at least two of the three, but she had personality, as we all do, in the deeper sense of hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows, that emotional matrix through which we lead our lives.

            As I see it, our fascination with ChatGPT is a symptom of our flight from inwardness and personality; it marks out our fear or laziness in approaching the mystery of our selves outside of rational comprehension or calculation. ChatGPT is like chatter, substituting the need for inwardness, of authentic individuality, with a gloss. A creative friend submits Chat’s responses to a “boredom test”: one can feel that they lack spark or an inner life. The boredom test warns us that we are entering the theater of convention. But how many of us heed that warning, or understand this theater’s deleterious effects?

            Chat, similar to its social media cousins, moves us outside our selves and into the collective. It packages “crowd-sourced” information. We are led into a hall of mirrors, in which we describe our world in the language of others. These “others” are fully depersonalized, anonymized, in fact de-humanized. Yet Chat, in its puppetry and mimicry, feigns authenticity. Can this be healthy, or a source of health?

            Thinkers, old and new, have consistently noted the growing influence of crowds: the “groupthink” derived from Orwell; Sartre’s Being-for-others; Heidegger’s “das Man,” whose involvement with chatter (Gerede) marks an inauthentic life. What are the consequences (and to answer this question, we should not rely on the purveyors of AI!)? Here is one answer, taking a cue from Jung, who writes:

It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this…. ¹  

If Chat, assembling this aggregate and using “large language” to write coherent statements, becomes the authority of meaning (in practice if not in actual primacy), if it writes our emails and addresses our inquiries, even those about our health, if it composes our music and creates our visual art, what unholy loss might ensue, in the sense of responsibility, morality, and freedom? We base our actions — no more than this, our sense of ourselves — on common denominators, determined by hidden algorithms. To continue with Jung:

Society, by automatically (my emphasis!) stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. The process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand.

And so he concludes this thought:

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is (my emphasis again). (pp. 153, 155).

Jung was writing these thoughts before the advent of AI, but like all genuine thinkers, he was attuned to the currents of his time that possessed a pressing force that shaped future events (already a century earlier Kierkegaard was sounding a warning over the loss of individuality).

            Let me return to the phrase “writing these words” and connect it to his call for “profound reflection.” Writing, authentic writing, is a process of discovery, one “uncommonly difficult” if we take it seriously (and, we might add, anything taken seriously is uncommonly difficult, not to mention uncommon). When we write, we may discover the uncommon insights of writers who possessed wide personalities and rich inner lives. Who can confine, with neat dogma, the passionate force of the letters of St. Paul? Who would limit, with Stoic rationalism, the emotional range of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius? Who would rest content in the axiom that Petrarch’s letters repressed cares, joys, and anxieties in order the voice the authority of reason?

            The humanities are the guardians of language! Yes, to be sure, and therefore writing, language, authentic conversation (not chatter) that occurs in the exchange of letters (not emails): these are paths we must follow if we wish to consider health in the sense of the wholeness of self and personality. The path is difficult. There are few things more difficult than writing, more liable to diversion, more easily seduced by commonplaces. But the path (hodós) founds a method (méthodos) that provides a compass (períodos) around this mania for technology. ²

— Roberto Fubini