Haiku 2023–357

artist or cheater?

struggling with the concept

of using AI

— —

I’m going to state this right up front: with the exception of Haiku 2023–264, nothing more intelligent than a spell checker has touched any of the writing that I’ve authored in this space this year.

While I by no means consider myself to be an artist, I enjoy the doing artistic things within my limited skill set that intersect with other parts of my life. For example, Haiku 2023–350 started a chain of thought about how computer programming could be use to create art using my words. It dovetailed nicely with a program I wrote analyzing the frequency of words used in my writing. I took a crash course in a graphical user interface tool and set about making my vision come to life. After about two hours of work, I wrote a program that got me excruciatingly close to where I wanted to be.

Then I hit a dead end.

The words appeared on the screen, but the colors didn’t. I tinkered and fussed and fiddled with the code, but nothing seemed to work. I was on the verge of giving up when I was reminded about the powers of AI.

I went to the ChatGPT website and pasted my code into the window. I was amazed with the return I got. It analyzed the code and described almost exactly the goal I was trying to achieve. It corrected my code and asked me to try again. I did so and it almost worked. I wrote back to ChatGPT what the problems were. It apologized for making a mistake, corrected the code, and sent it to me again. We went through this process one more time before we arrived at a result close to what I was aiming for. A bit more research on my part lead to a solution. With a couple of small tweaks, I fully realized my vision.

My new vision, however, inspired a new vision.

In an attempt to make this artwork dynamic rather than static, I modified the code again. Again, I came close, but didn’t make it. Another session with ChatGPT yielded code just beyond my level of understanding, but realized the new vision almost perfectly.

So the question remains, am I the artist or am I a cheater? Is ChatGPT just a tool in the toolbox or is it now a collaborator that deserves credit?