ChatGPT and writing

 I don't know how to say this but our lives are governed by so much perfection these days that it can be pretty frustrating.  Write an email at work, and you suddenly are sending it through AI to make sure that we are dotting the i's and crossing the t's.  The sentence gets reworded dramatically.  It's all so exquisite and perfect.  That original sentence written feels like a hotchpotch of words.  The embarrassment of writing the original gnaws at you.  How could I have written such a bad sentence! The new composition has the perfect diction, tone and grammar with flowery and glittering prose.  Oh, if you don't want that, in a matter of seconds, it switches to a more professional tone.  If not that, it becomes friendly and casual.  If everything fails, it just rewrites into something totally new that you are left wondering what you actually started off with.  Yes, it's all awesome, but in the end, the end product is deprived of something crucial -  the very essence of its soul.  Writing is so personal and unique that there is a distinct flair to every essay, actually, every sentence.  When you replace that with AI, you have literally stripped that uniqueness.  

For me, writing is a very important part of my life.  My blog of many years ago is almost dead now.  What started off as a very fun writing exercise, gradually got sucked into the usual readership woes and writer's block that should never have happened in the first place.  Whom am I writing for? Why am I writing? I guess the more important question should be, How am I writing? For me, the last question is why I am really writing.  I really wanted to improve my writing, and convey something to the person reading the blog.  Of course, when I started the blog, I was tone deaf.  As soon as I used to compose a post, I would broadcast it to a bunch of my friends, and even remote acquaintances, waiting to elicit an opinion from them.  There was something about being recognized for good work, be it in art, music or prose.  Writing is very similar to art.  When you put something in words, and those words are simple and make sense, it is like magic.  When somebody reading your work falls in love with it, there is an overwhelming sense of pride.  Art does that, isn't it? When you respect an art form, there is no way in the world you would try to steal the work to get a glimpse of it.  Piracy goes out of the window.  You want to read the actual version of the book from the library or by paying for it.  Anyway, as always, I digress.

Today, when I got up in the morning, one of my friends from the Bay Area who is currently on a Bangalore visit had left a message.  

Praveen, I was searching for "Cynosure Circulating Library" and you know what, I landed on your blog.  I must be the only person in the world to have done a google search for “cynosure circulating library” and to have found your link at that. What an unbelievably small world. 

We spent the next fifteen minutes talking about the Malleswaram neighborhood, about the library, and what an impact it had on our childhood.  Those were really simple times.  The kids in the neighborhood would go everyday to the library to pick up a book of their choice and would line up in the courtyard to read the books.  Just the fact that we could connect and talk so much about these things because of a simple blog post was fabulous.  I always wondered who reads these posts when the attention span of an individual has gone down to a few milliseconds.  It's such a fast paced world.  But even if one person can read something on the blog, and it helps both of you to connect in ways you could never imagine, I feel the blog has kinda served its purpose.  

It was a post I had written in 2011, way before anyone even thought about AI.  Way before Grammarly was even a proper company.  Way before doing a grammar check on Word was the norm.  Way before people were looking for perfection.  Way before simple things had profound meaning in life.  

Don't get me wrong.  I love ChatGPT.  I love to get information instantaneously.  I love AI.  It has given a lot of meaning to my life.  I like how it has made learning Sanskrit amazing.  I like learning new things from AI.  I like to cross check the Vedantic learnings.  But when I am writing a blog post, the last thing I want to be looking at is ChatGPT.  I don't want my writing to be bereft of my soul.  I still want it to be MY writing with all the errors, views and judgements.  I still want to be judged based on how I write.  I would like to keep it that way for as long as I can.