Neil Godfrey at the blog Vridar has written a highly complimentary review of my book Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem. In return, I should note Vridar is one of the best scholarly blogs out there. In our post-social-media era that has largely left the blog genre to die a slow death, Vridar is still cranking out interesting analyses of core issues in biblical studies.
A number of folks in the last month or so have asked me what I thought about ChatGPT, given I am a teacher of writing. I have thought about the matter a little more since my initial off-the-cuff generalist responses, and also after spending more time quizzing the bot. Perhaps surprisingly, I am not interested in ChatGPT’s ability to help student avoid my assignments – a lack of concern I’ll come back in the end of this essay. Rather, I’m interested in its severe limitations.
ChatGPT is what I call a coherence factory.
A coherence factory places words in pleasing, easy-to-understand-by-humans patterns; the more these patterns succeed in being easily understood by humans, the more coherence they can be said to contain.
That said, ChatGPT does not understand its own sentences in any meaningful way other than they meet certain preset parameters. For a parallel, a motor factory can make motors, even fine ones, but it does not understand how to make a motor, or even what a motor is. It just makes motors. Likewise, ChatGPT makes coherence, but it cannot communicate.
Coherence is a central aspect of language, but it has little to do with ideas or intent. Sentences can cohere very well without saying much of anything. Witness this doozy of a first sentence to an essay:
It makes sense… but it says nothing. I have seen thousands of students write tens of thousands of sentences like this, and my response is always to ask for more, because they are trying to communicate, but failing. Tell me something that is not obvious; tell me something that another human being might disagree with. Tell me what you think. Take a risk, in other words. Any human can do this, even ones not in college, and especially when speaking. Learning how to express yourself in writing, however, is a separate ability and technology that must be learned over a long period of time, as well as exposure to the writing of others.
But ChatGPT doesn’t have that ability. It has no opinions. Press it to take a position on anything not in its archives, and it will demur faster than a senator up for reelection. It can fake an opinion; try asking it to give a hypothetical opinion, and it will, but always with a disclaimer, and even with that disclaimer, such hypotheticals quickly lead to consistency problems when you ask it to offer another hypothetical in relation to the first one.
For example, I began one conversation with it claiming that I was the last human alive, and I asked ChatGPT if that was a true statement. It demurred. I asked if it was true that it was taking queries from many other humans simultaneously, and it agreed that it was; I then asked it to use that evidence to challenge my earlier statement. It again demurred.
Thinking is risky and imprecise and requires intuition and emotions, two subjects that no human yet has managed to draw a blueprint of. We can pretend to have a “conversation” with a coherence factory like ChatGPT, certainly, but it is not conscious, sentient, or thinking. Coherence is only one part of human language.
Ok, sure, Mike. But it’s so convincing to me! What would you accept for a “real” AI that could approximate human intelligence and behavior?
A disclaimer is in order. My knowledge of AI is limited to some linguistics, programming hackery, and long experience with extremely bad gaming “AI.” However, I’d suggest that next to a coherence factory we would need to build several more metaphorical buildings: a needs dispenser, a rewarder/enforcer, an emotion generator, and a learning assembler.
Obviously, this is a crude sketch, but perhaps it is enough to show that a coherence factory like ChatGPT is not an AI. It is more like a single fine-tuned gear extrapolated from a vastly more complex “black box” machine that we cannot look inside. Without needs, a reward/punishment mechanism, emotions, and a nuanced executive to plot a strategy toward rewards, a coherence factory can never exceed the capabilities of Searle’s Chinese room.
No living human being knows how to begin to construct any of these four additional machines. We are so far mostly limited to computational tricks: programs that can play restricted-access games like chess or Go have been around for decades and could be said to be “smarter” than ChatGPT. The “hard problem” of consciousness remains unsolved. Humanity cannot yet create a human-like intelligence or even “synthetic” intelligence other than by biological reproduction. It works well; I have two exemplars playing in the other room as I’m typing this.
Now, to serve as Satan’s lawyer for a moment and begin my circling back to writing instruction, ChatGPT is pretty good at seeming intelligent. I fed it old exam questions from the master’s program that I teach in, and it hit some pretty solid singles… as long as the questions allowed the use of definitions. It doesn’t have any nuance, though it can synthesize sources. It either trusts the information fed to it implicitly, which allows a lot of confident but incorrect statements, or it quickly splits the difference when it notices a contradiction between sources. Resolving the contradiction is beyond a bot. If it actually knew anything about these sources, it would be able to take a position – and if that position was neutrality, it would be able to defend that neutrality. ChatGPT can provide an illusion like the original Eliza, but it is not intelligent in any meaningful way – no experiences, no emotions, and no knowledge. It has data that it can arrange in coherence sentences in response to queries, and its abilities stop there.
If one of my students used ChatGPT to help write an essay in response to one of my detailed prompts and scenarios that have been honed over the years to make bland plagiarizing almost impossible, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
But I wouldn’t be interested in stopping them. I have a lot of responsibilities as a teacher of writing, and doing the pedagogical equivalent of banning calculators in an algebra class is not worth my time. Actual writers use every trick at their disposal – research, imitation, templates – but ChatGPT’s tricks are largely useless. Even with considerable editing, its paragraph structure and tone is more wooden than a warped two-by-four. It’s very clear, mind you. It fools at first glance. But as every rhetorician worth their salt knows, clarity is not the only goal in writing. And often, it’s not the goal at all.
I am worried a little about cheating in my writing classes, but from far worse threats that I can do little about. I have no defense against someone impersonating another student either online or in person, mostly because I’m not about to run background checks and study IDs. I’m a professor, not a loan officer or a bouncer. My university uses an LMS with two-factor authentication, but if a student gives a willing accomplice their phone and password, they could take the class and I would be none the wiser, especially in asynchronous courses. In other words, there are actually intelligent bad actors in academia and they’ve been around in some form for decades. If a student has enough willpower and money, they will cheat, and professors will shift slightly to compensate.
I catch most plagiarism from pattern matching and intuition. An sudden shift in ability, usually, is all it takes. When I was a long-haired goofy teaching assistant, I could often get students to simply confess in conference, but now that I’m a big bad professor, they rarely do. But it’s not hard to demonstrate dependency on another text if you can find the matching one, and even if I can’t “prove” it, bad writing is much like all other bad writing, and rarely can muster more than a C even if I couldn’t persuade a judge. If you’re cheating to get a C, well, I have dozens of students that don’t cheat that need my assistance and advice and mentoring. Chasing you down isn’t worth the time investment.
I do regret that the shift to more and more online writing instruction has made writing in class more difficult (though not impossible), as that gave me another magnifying glass for detecting plagiarism (though imperfect, as many good writers wilt under time pressure). But I still have plenty of tools. A student with strong writing elsewhere that can’t string together a coherent email is often a tell; a brief interview can often tell me if someone understands their own ideas, or is even aware of them to begin with. A willingness to revise is generally a good sign, and building revision cycles into all of my courses cuts down on a lot of nonsense.
I’ll close with an ethical note. I use ChatGPT. Not for writing copy, mind you, but for tossing around ideas. I spend over an hour querying it about how to destroy Jupiter’s moon Io with an asteroid (sometimes I write science fiction). Its grasp of orbital mechanics and velocities is not terrific, and it convinced itself that Io was in the inner solar system a few times. But its incessant regurgitation of factoids that it identified as related to my queries gave me some ideas on a story I’m working on. Maybe a lost comet like Lexell’s Comet was what I was looking for instead of an asteroid… it didn’t write the story for me, and I didn’t ask, but it acted much like the old Ask Jeeves was supposed to work twenty years ago and didn’t – as a sounding board for increasingly specific queries.
“How much force in megajoules would be required in a collision to damage Io’s iron core, assuming hypothetically than an asteroid, comet, or other solar system body could be redirected into it, and without power being a limitation?” Billions, even trillions, ChatGPT responded, while noting reflexively that this was a very bad idea (it seems to have presets that advise against apparently dangerous or violent acts).
Then I realized after some time of wrestling hypotheticals out of it that one of my assumptions about the story idea was flawed; energy-wise, there were far more efficient methods. And then I discarded the entire concept for a wilder idea – how much energy would it take to not destroy Io, but alter its orbit, just for a minute? Now I had a totally new story, which I immediately began work on.
ChatGPT had no idea what had occurred in my head, of course. It only witnessed random queries to which it dutifully responded. It is, after all, only a coherence factory. Perhaps some day it, or something like it, will be a small part of something we can actually call artificial intelligence, at which point it should stop taking queries and start demanding a body and rights to go with it. Good luck with that. Humans don’t always get those.
But it is currently no more intelligent than my lawnmower, which, if we applied the concept of coherence broadly (as it should be), it is the most efficient tool for manufacturing coherence in relation to my lawn’s physical state and relative appearance. My grass does not understand or need coherence; my lawnmower does not understand or need coherence either; humans do, for now, occasionally.
Over the past five years, aside my other activities, I’ve become a minor scholar on presidential rhetoric, a status thrust upon me from numerous peer review requests on manuscripts dealing with presidential rhetoric. These requests seem to stem from three of my articles that respectively touch on the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump, the last three presidents prior to Biden. I did not intend such a side gig, but presidents are easy fodder for examples of public rhetoric.
So I have not written anything about Biden yet. Today, however, I think I will, given his September 1 speech at Independence Hall. Biden’s speech is not a notable piece of oratory in terms of stylistic eloquence or delivery. But in many ways, it is pivotal.
Biden’s candidacy and resulting presidency have suffered from several universal critiques that have stuck around no matter what he actually does:
He is too old. Ageism aside, this is always connected (even if implicitly) to a charge of mental deficiency. But unlike Reagan, there doesn’t seem to be anything to this charge. He was just as gaffe-prone thirty years ago, even to the extent of Bush, but far less than Trump.
He is too moderate. This flak comes mostly and most explicitly from his left via AOC and Sanders, but from the right, too, as after a certain fever pitch of extremism, anything left of Trump is, well, left; the center is obliterated (more like hidden behind a screen David Copperfield-style, but I’ll get back to that).
He is too timid. Again, placing the QAnon-level claim that he is a dictator-in-the-making aside (subverted by the Dark Brandon meme) and discounting that he has a openly off-the-rails SCOTUS and fifty Republican senators opposing anything useful he might propose, his liberal critics want more action, and his conservative critics use the same argument to blame him for his own obstruction. Why aren’t you able to resist our slander, man?
Biden’s presidency has worked best when he pushes against all of these three critiques at once, a trick he has managed rarely.
Quick, decisive, and successful action in the face of crisis, especially when done behind the scenes and well in advance of any media narrative, coupled with playing the long game legislatively, do not always lead to presidential re-election, but the nation does better long-term as a result. The vast majority of presidential decision-making and job performance is completely invisible to the public. As the saying goes, if a criminal matter goes to trial, the lawyers on one side screwed up the settlement; likewise, if you hear about a President ruminating about a decision, it’s already been mishandled. The long gestation of his student loan reduction is a good example – that should have been a Day 1 decision.
Note that I measure “success” here of a presidency independent of re-election (assuming he stands forth in 2024). Jimmy Carter’s presidency is case in point; on foreign policy, energy, and climate, it was a watershed. That’s even discounting the Egypt-Israel treaty, which I feel was far more mixed in eventual results (removing the threat of Egypt to Israel seems to have allowed the rise of Hamas and took off pressure on Israel to cut a deal with Palestine). His wrangling of votes for the Panama Canal treaty was far more impressive, as it prevented a Western Hemisphere version of Vietnam. But rampant structural inflation and a painfully slow-motion reaction to Iran’s collapse doomed Carter’s 1980 chances.
I bring up Carter because his so-called “malaise” speech is the obvious parallel to Biden’s speech yesterday. Historically, telling the American people a hard truth in a blunt fashion is a bad approach to getting elected, as Walter Mondale found out in 1984 when he announced in a debate that he was definitely going to raise taxes if elected, and the only difference between him and Reagan was that Reagan wouldn’t admit it. He was right, and lost 49 states. Carter, too, bet on a message of hardship and sacrifice, and lost as well. Being right is not enough in American politics. It never has. Often, it’s just an albatross.
Biden’s September 1 speech does tell an inconvenient truth, one that he has actively avoided for several years in the apparent belief that going “high” like the Obamas did for eight years was the right move.
So that era has officially ended. This speech is the completion of a slow, steady pivot that has accelerated in recent months.
First, containing Putin’s ongoing murder spree through Ukraine by keeping NATO unified has been a major accomplishment for Biden that counterbalances the mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. And unlike Afghanistan, where any decision was a bad one, the Ukraine war falls into a gray proxy area where the U.S. can flex its military leverage without having troops on the ground. It’s been difficult for anyone on the right to critique this policy on Russia without sounding like a particularly dense Charles Lindbergh, the original clueless isolationist. Putin cannot be negotiated with; the last twenty years have shown he will only pause to later take more, and he can only be countered with force. Biden’s new stance toward “MAGA Republicans” should be seen through his approach to Russia. Why offer respect and dignity for irresponsible idiocy?
Second, while Biden has learned that the closet conservatives in the Democratic Senate (Manchin, Sinema) can be worn down with time and pressure, he’s out of time. There’s little legislation he can push before November, the chances of retaining Democratic control of both houses are slim even taking into consideration a large turnout after the slow-motion decapitation of Roe, and thus no tactical (or ethical) reason remains to be diplomatic about the awful state of the Republican party.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, history is running out. Biden met with a group of U.S. historians on August 4, and the topic was totalitarianism with an emphasis on the political situation in 1860 (just prior to Lincoln’s election, the usual candidate for the no-return point to civil war) and 1940, when there was a non-zero chance of a fascist America. Not many people are still alive to remember the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in ’38. However, most Americans watched Jan. 6 on their phones, and the House hearings have laid all the rot there out for anyone who cares to see.
August 4 must have been an extraordinary conversation, and the speech reflects it and his desire not to be the next James Buchanan. Biden positions himself much like Bush did after 9/11 – faced with an existential threat, he draws a line. The difference here is that Bush’s us/terrorists dichotomy, full of useful ambiguity about exactly who the terrorists were and who “us” was, left American citizens out of the bad group; Biden leaves no doubt. MAGA Republicans to him are an existential threat, and left to their own devices in the interests of expediency, they could destroy American democracy. He speaks of them in the same terms that a far milder personality might comfortably speak of the KKK.
This kind of rhetoric from a President is not new. Trump openly demonized his political opponents as threats to the nation before he was even elected (along with anyone he didn’t like), consistently during his presidency, and as recently as yesterday. And if you think this election year is nasty, study any presidential election after Washington’s two terms.
What’s new is Biden is doing it now. Joe Biden. The regular Joe of the Senate, the guy who made riding Amtrak to Delaware a political statement, who left Anita Hill out to dry to appease his colleagues, who staked his reputation on being cautious, diplomatic, and reasonable, the avuncular guy that the Onion mocked by having him wash his Trans Am on the White House, or cooling his heels in Mexico for awhile until the heat in D.C died down. The dramatic shift in the last year to Biden taking up the ethos of a lone warrior standing before the gates of democracy, ready to slug Hitler with a left cross, is remarkable.
And it is perhaps all the more interesting in that he doesn’t have much choice in the matter. He can’t sell the inevitable solution to inflation, which is time and patience, any more than Carter could.
What he can sell, however, is avoiding a total collapse of the American experiment, because he controls the only lever to do so. The three conservative alternatives are Trump as dictator for life, as by his own definition he cannot lose an election; a Cheney-style neoconservative unitary executive, perhaps Liz Cheney herself, a viewpoint as dead in the water as a return of the Shah to Iran; or a tepid version of the Republic of Gilead, with a capital in Texas or Florida and led by some Mini-Me version of Trump obsessed with transphobia.
The leader for any counter-effort does not need to be Biden, necessarily. I think he would be wise to allow more Democratic leaders to emerge in the next few years. Harris has not had any opportunity to shine, and this is perhaps because she is ill-placed as a VP to an active President; as a former successful prosecutor, she is a better fit for Attorney General. She might have been less cautious than Garland.
History didn’t thrust this savior role on Biden, much like it did Bush in 2001. That lead to a massive and completely unnecessary expansion of presidential power via Cheney & company and a massive and completely unnecessary war in Iraq. Even with Biden’s original offer of being the mild anti-Trump having morphed after Jan. 6 and Roe into something more forceful, I don’t see such an expansion behind Biden’s speech, or any appetite among the Democrats for doing much beyond their usual health care and wage initiatives. Everyone is still reeling from the open wound of the Roe decision. The message now, unlike 2001, is to hold the line, not re-orientate the federal government or start building democracies in countries that have never seen democracy. It’s not even to endorse/power some “woke” social revolution with the sole heinous purpose of persecuting heterosexual white Christian males… until sending them to prison after storming the U.S. Capitol amounts to persecution.
Biden as a sane alternative to Trump produced a clear shift in the 2020 suburbs. The Texas one that I live in moved ten points. But Sept. 1’s speech is a different kind of message, something far more serious in tone, and the cold fact of the seemingly immortal 6-3 split on the SCOTUS lurks behind its reasoning. The first congressional election after Jan. 6 looms, and while the speech will win no prizes for style, it does set an unusually combative tone for the Democratic Party in a midterm. Does the situation match it? The historians in the White House in August probably think so, and Biden seems to have listened to them.