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Witerati: Of writer’s block & ChatGPT’s unlock
On World Book Day, even as the debate over the boon and bane of ChatGPT rages, what is worrisome for authors is that AI may snatch from us that uniquely human occupational hallmark – writer’s block
ChatGPT has started to feel like King Charles’ coronation quiche. One can’t seem to have enough of it. Quiche Quiche hota hai!
It’s here, there, everywhere.
Open any paper’s edit or op-ed page, there from the headlines it screams out. Browse any television channel or Instagram and Twitter handle, there it pops up.
It’s come to haunt us like the omnipresence or omnipotence of the Orwellian ‘Big Brother’.
No social discourse happens without ChatGPT creeping into it, much in the manner of a sticky sauce from a Subway sandwich trickling on to all one’s clothes. Frock, sock and apparel.
Thus it was that at a recent meaningful literary debate, panellists pontificated about the boon and bane of it. Erudite speakers shared how ChatGPT churns out romantic customised couplets if one is saddled with a poetry challenged partner and can even be prompted to pen poems like Rumi. For better or for verse. That remains to be seen.
The endless list of incredible things the genie called AI can do unrolled, like surprises and surmises over a Booker Long List. What tickled one to sit up startled was an innocuous comment that when stuck with a scarcity of ideas, to pen a newspaper column or a book script, ChatGPT comes to the rescue by even popping up a million story ideas.
Hell, no!
That AI can take over this and that of human intelligence is old hat. What set one’s alarm bells ringing was this niggling spin-off -- does this augur an adieu to that uniquely human writerly experience called ‘writer’s block’?
Hope, no!
Legions of wielders of the pen, especially from that tribe called the scribe, will swear as to how they have survived, even thrived, this speed breaker that’s an occupational hallmark. ‘Writer’s block’ would scarcely have spared a scribe or storywriter worth his or her mark.
Subspecies of scribes have manifested it in myriad manners.
There’s that tribe for whom ‘writer’s block’ has been, butt naturally, directly proportional to the cigarette stubs stacking upon their workstations, like a mammoth Mount Kailash or Kilimanjaro.
Many are the times we grew up watching our editors blowing puff upon puff as their grey cells struggled with that bedrock upon which an article or edit was to be built – ideation.
After an eternity of being cloaked in curling clouds from Charminar or Gold Flake, their fog of ‘writer’s block’ would suddenly lift. Voila, there would burst upon them an edit’s eureka moment. The perfect idea.
Then, there is the scribe tribe whom one has seen battling an idea deficit, not with cigarette butts but with endless rounds of kadak chai or coffee. The contents of the mini museum of tea crockery housed on their work tables being directly proportional to the severity of writer’s block.
There was one DNE (deputy news editor) whom we oftentimes witnessed wielding the glass paperweight on his table in place of the pen when in the throes, rather ‘throws’, of writer’s block. He would rotate the paperweight like ‘Bhajji’ spinning a ball. When his writer’s block got worse, the paperweight’s antics began to bear uncanny resemblance to the earth spinning on its axis atop a supersonic treadmill, raring to fly off to Mars.
It’s another story that paperweights were known to even fly across the newsroom on other occasions that had nothing to do with waywardness from writer’s block, more to do with flared tempers running amok.
Heck, so ChatGPT seems set to snatch from us these sights, sounds and struggles intrinsic to writer’s block.
A tap of an app will now do the ideation that authorhood’s grey cells were wont to struggle with for hours or weeks. “Write English better than Shashi Tharoor” to “Pen a passage like Khushwant Singh”, ideation will now be tossed up in a jiffy, like two-minute instant noodles. Perhaps, bolder, better, battier.
The curious case of “Honey, I Shrunk the (Writer’s Block) Kicks”.
chetnakeer@yahoo.com
