Can we have a moratorium on Chat GPT stunt journalism, please? With all respect to Gideon Fink Shapiro—and to my good friend and fellow critic Mark Lamster, who recently asked AI to review Morphosis’s Perot Museum in a piece for the Dallas Morning News—I think I speak for many readers when I say, Basta. I’ve now slogged through essays whose authors pose a series of prompts to ChatGPT about financial advice, office politics, the best restaurants in Los Angeles, alternate endings for Game of Thrones, ChatGPT’s own interest in world domination, and now, in two publications, of all the obscure topics in the world, architecture criticism. These pieces all have the same subtext, of course: anxiety. About the future of journalism, about the value of human intellect, and about where all of us are going to find a paycheck when the bots work for free. There is some paint-by-numbers expediency about them, of course, but also a faint whiff of desperation, which is the saddest of all critical registers to write in. In NYRA’s piece [see “Is Architecture Criticism Pointless? Not According to AI (Redux)” in #33], ChatGPT itself seemed, above all else, bored, responding in the Wikipedia monotone it has perfected. Far more intriguing, if I can put myself in Sammy Medina’s chair for a moment, would have been a piece exploring the fact that we now increasingly interact with digital technology by means of the prompt—telling it what to do—rather than asking it where to find something, as we do (or did) with Google: rhetorically giving ourselves some odd illusion of control at the very moment, thanks to the power of AI we have unleashed, that we are in fact ceding it. Or maybe an essay about the revival, thanks to the way ChatGPT dredges the internet for information before stitching together its answers, of pastiche, or collage—albeit an unwitting version, and in a far different context than in the heyday of PoMo.
I can’t complain about the “Redux” part of the headline, though—publishing two versions of the same piece, assuming you also get paid twice, is and has always been a freelance writing coup.