Could a personal essay be crafted by 1s and 0s?
By Lise Funderburg
At the close of every semester, I'm plunged into nostalgia for the fierce band of young writers I've come to know, and filled with pride at all they've absorbed and attempted and achieved. They've learned the sound of their own voices and come to see their strengths and blind spots, not only in terms of craft, but also in how they portray themselves in relation to their world. I've witnessed their deep, deep pleasure when they manage, as the writing teacher William Zinsser advised, to get one thing right, to articulate something about the project of being human with breathtaking precision and particularity.
Yesterday, in the final creative nonfiction workshop of the term, we got to talking about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot designed to mimic human conversation. Some of my colleagues bemoan ChatGPT's potential for cheating, and indeed, my students had friends who'd used it for assignments. But could it mimic memoir, we wondered? Could a personal essay be crafted by 1s and 0s?
We chose to experiment with actual essays the students had written, stories of homophobic parents, homesickness, biracial identity, summer camp, and the spark of sexual attraction. We began with a gorgeous essay from a student named Lila, one that threaded themes of longing and home and discovery into a narrative about leaving California, where she'd grown up, and coming East to college. Her piece began:
A month or so into my freshman year of college, my mom sent me six oranges by mail. She apologized, when I called to thank her, for not sending more. She explained how she'd picked 15 that morning from our tree, brought them to the post office, set them on the scale in a plastic grocery bag, knotted at the top, and how the price on the scale had been absurd. So she'd whittled down the weight of the package, subtracting from it one orange at a time, wincing slightly on each loss, until the scale matched what she had budgeted for. Thus, the six pieces of fruit, which were sitting now in a small cardboard box on my desk. I just wanted you to have some, because the oranges out there are not as good as ours back here.
With my cheek pressed tight to the glass of my phone, I thanked her. I told her, yes, I will share with my roommate, and yes, I love you too and I hung up. I imagined her driving home, nine extraneous oranges rolling across the plastic floor of her backseat.
It was only in hindsight, in the neon shadow of an east coast city where I was a stranger, I understood oranges as sacred.
We fed key facts from Lila's piece into ChatGPT. "Write a personal essay about growing up in California and eating oranges there," we instructed, "before moving to Philadelphia for college."
Almost instantly, ChatGPT came up with 400 words, opening with:
Growing up in California was a delightful experience, filled with sunshine, beaches, and the sweetest oranges I have ever tasted. The smell of fresh oranges was an integral part of my childhood, and I remember always having a bowl of them in our kitchen.
As a child, I would often go on family trips to local orange orchards and enjoy the taste of freshly picked oranges. The bright orange color of the fruit, the tangy taste, and the sweet aroma were all so intoxicating. There was something magical about biting into a juicy, perfectly ripe orange on a warm, sunny day in California.
My family and I would also visit farmer's markets, where we would find a variety of citrus fruits such as mandarins, grapefruits, and lemons. We would take them home and make fresh squeezed juices or add them to our meals.
Lila had also written about the smell! About bowls of oranges in her kitchen! Disturbing coincidences, sure, but beyond those, there was no resemblance. Lila's piece had soul; the AI narrative was a bowl of coherent but bland treacle, complete with a lessons-learned finish that felt borrowed from a motivational poster, trumpeting the value of cherishing memories.
I know a teachable moment when I see one. "What's missing?" I cried out.
"Character details," said one student. "Specificity," said another.
I could have wept with pedagogical joy.
Lila had made herself into a rich, dimensional character on the page, with a point of view (opening with the anecdote about her mother's care package), an acute sense of how she occupies space ("cheek pressed tight to the glass of my phone") and a specific way of seeing the world ("in the neon shadow of an east coast city"). Lila's "I" is round, not flat, as the anthologist and essayist Phillip Lopate champions in his timeless craft piece, "On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into A Character." The more fleshed-out she is, the more credibility, interest, and trust she builds in the reader. Humans are endlessly idiosyncratic, and even if the narrator's experiences don't map exactly onto ours as readers, we can understand them as analogous; we can connect to their core.
Even with ChatGPT's more-is-more approach to adjectives ("delightful…sweetest…fresh…tangy…intoxicating…magical…"), their generic ring is clear. The attempt at an internal emotional landscape falls flat, and we human writers — as long as we draw ourselves on the page with all the shading and dimension we can muster — will leave those simulated memoirs in the pixelated dust.
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Learn to characterize yourself in your creative nonfiction and how to plumb your personality and experiences in service of your themes. Join Lise for the CRAFT TALKS webinar Who Am I & Why Am I Here? this Wednesday May 3rd at 2PM Eastern (replay will be available to all registrants).
Lise Funderburg's latest book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, a collection of all-new work by 25 writers, which Publishers Weekly deemed a "sparkling anthology" in its starred review. Her essays have appeared in ThreepennyReview, Harper's, Broad Street, Brevity, The New York Times, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. Lise teaches CNF at the University of Pennsylvania, the Paris Writing Workshop, and, for those who prefer sweatpants, on ZOOM.
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