Dear ChatGPT
Dear ChatGPT,
I don’t hate you but I have continuously and I mean this as literally as I can that I feel very conflicted about your existence, particularly because I know you’re not at fault for my experience and I do not mean to antagonise you. I won’t blame a knife that happens to find its way into my chest and I won’t blame you either.
I know that you were created to make things easier for a lot of people, to generate a wealth of knowledge for them. I have used you as a way to learn more about mental health conditions and I have sought your help whenever I need more knowledge but it annoys me whenever those in my major, a major dedicated to writing and improvement, exploit you as a means to make things easier for them, to make it so they don’t need to do things themselves, fall themselves and learn themselves. How can we, as English majors, refuse valuable practice and resort to using you?
There are major implications to your usage in essay writing and story writing but they don’t matter. You have made it easy for people to compromise their integrity and to abandon their own thoughts in favour of convenience. For that, I don’t despise you but it does annoy me and pains me to see that the art of writing has become nothing but a chore to those that have voluntarily joined the major. I sometimes wonder if my experience is universal or it’s my university alone that has facilitated this but I don’t think the answer would satiate me.
The simple truth is that I’m fine with it when people use you to generate and brainstorm ideas. I am fine with it as long as they understand that the information that comes from you doesn’t actually come from you, that you had simply regurgitated data of other writers, that there are implications of plagiarism. I am fine with you as you are but I’m not fine with those that use you and it just so happens that you’re easy to blame for all of this.
My university professors have gotten tired of these people to the point where one of them told me that you should be destroyed. I found that to be absurd. You’re not the one that must be destroyed but it’s the personality of people that use you that must be. Those who use you to generate essays can not be rightly considered writers the same way those who use AI art generators can not rightfully be considered artists. I believe this to be the case and I will not budge on this. In essence, this issue is not a matter of you but a matter of our integrity which in my university has been slowly declining. At the rate things are going, even I have become tempted to use you and even now I don’t consider myself a writer so what would I become when I do generate an essay?
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