This is funny, Ramona. I’ve been doing these kinds of tests of chatbots for a couple of years, because I’m concerned about the ethical quandaries for writers this all brings up. In my case, it could draw generic info about me because of Talking Writing that was mostly accurate, even right after OpenAI first released a public version of C…
This is funny, Ramona. I’ve been doing these kinds of tests of chatbots for a couple of years, because I’m concerned about the ethical quandaries for writers this all brings up. In my case, it could draw generic info about me because of Talking Writing that was mostly accurate, even right after OpenAI first released a public version of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. It could also mimic my writing style, although the bots now have more guardrails in place to (supposedly) avoid such ripoffs. (Ha!)
When I tried your experiment today, it came back with stuff from my website, titles of my books, and a few other sources: Martha writes about first-person journalism, mental-health issues, adoption, etc. Boring - and you’re right, it is a suck-up, designed to be a helpful customer service agent giving you what you ask for.
When I asked it to list some of my specific articles, it generated a whole raft of them from Salon in the wayback days - which only indicates how search algorithms, SEO, and what’s freely available play a part in the information generated. It’s one of the most problematic things about doing research with bots - we can fact-check obvious hallucinations but we also need to question what’s missing. When it comes to print work that hasn’t been digitized (which applies to many books and smaller journals pre-1990), it can feel like whole archives have evaporated.
What it tells me is that I'm invisible to algorithms, and that's not funny. I don't know what to do about that, seriously. What I need is a PR person! I'm terrible at it. I simply cannot blow my own horn or convince anyone to read me, let alone hire me.
I agree, being invisible to algorithms is serious — and it's going to become more serious as corporate media and tech companies control those algorithms. But I don't think what a chatbot dredges up necessarily reflects the total impact or visibility of a writer, especially one who is as active as you are on Substack. I have an increasing sense that "writers are doing it for themselves" these days (including journalists), and part of doing it is to recognize each other and to read each other's work.
This is funny, Ramona. I’ve been doing these kinds of tests of chatbots for a couple of years, because I’m concerned about the ethical quandaries for writers this all brings up. In my case, it could draw generic info about me because of Talking Writing that was mostly accurate, even right after OpenAI first released a public version of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. It could also mimic my writing style, although the bots now have more guardrails in place to (supposedly) avoid such ripoffs. (Ha!)
When I tried your experiment today, it came back with stuff from my website, titles of my books, and a few other sources: Martha writes about first-person journalism, mental-health issues, adoption, etc. Boring - and you’re right, it is a suck-up, designed to be a helpful customer service agent giving you what you ask for.
When I asked it to list some of my specific articles, it generated a whole raft of them from Salon in the wayback days - which only indicates how search algorithms, SEO, and what’s freely available play a part in the information generated. It’s one of the most problematic things about doing research with bots - we can fact-check obvious hallucinations but we also need to question what’s missing. When it comes to print work that hasn’t been digitized (which applies to many books and smaller journals pre-1990), it can feel like whole archives have evaporated.
What it tells me is that I'm invisible to algorithms, and that's not funny. I don't know what to do about that, seriously. What I need is a PR person! I'm terrible at it. I simply cannot blow my own horn or convince anyone to read me, let alone hire me.
I agree, being invisible to algorithms is serious — and it's going to become more serious as corporate media and tech companies control those algorithms. But I don't think what a chatbot dredges up necessarily reflects the total impact or visibility of a writer, especially one who is as active as you are on Substack. I have an increasing sense that "writers are doing it for themselves" these days (including journalists), and part of doing it is to recognize each other and to read each other's work.