Description
Chatbots have been used to write term papers, blog posts, stories, poems and books, but can they really write creatively? Can you use one to write, or help write, memoir or other personal writing or? The short answers are “no” and “yes.” But you will still have to do quite a bit of work. This workshop will look at how chatbots can be useful in personal nonfiction, what they can’t do and how to exercise caution when using them.
A chatbot operates by assimilating vast amounts of data from the internet and using algorithms, or formulas, to select or synthesize the algorithms’ most predictable response to any question you pose. If you give it a sequence of words, it can return the algorithms’ most plausible next sequence of words. There’s a catch, though: its response may or may not be correct or even make sense. It can analyze, select, compile and synthesize, but it can’t think — it doesn’t know what it’s doing, as a human does. Chatbots are also known to “hallucinate” — completely invent — responses.
The chatbot will not know anything about the specific details of your life, so you will have to provide — write — everything it needs to know, producing what amounts to a rough draft of your memoir. Given the right prompts, it can help you brainstorm ideas, research background information and organize your material in various ways, including a chapter outline.
The more you write for it, the more it can write, mimicking your style. But its writing will be generic; it can’t figure out new ways to think and write about the events of your life, as you can. Nor can it provide nuances of tone or style: no metaphors, no irony. The question is, why would you not want to write your own memoir?
Signe Hammer’s memoir, By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her other books include Daughters and Mothers: Mothers and Daughters — a Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection and a German best-seller — Passionate Attachments: Fathers and Daughters in America Today, and Women: Body and Culture: Essays on the Sexuality of Women in a Changing Society.
