The Chatbots have arrived, and depending on who you listen to, they’re going to either take most of our jobs or make our lives much easier. After playing around with ChatGPT a bit, I’ve concluded one profession is absolutely safe–that of a book reviewer–and that if I were a disingenuous student who didn’t want to put in the work of writing an essay about a canonical piece of literature, I’d have the AI do it.
Now, as AIs get more advanced, maybe this’ll change. But since ChatGPT’s knowledge base is pretty spotty for things that happened after 2021, you won’t be seeing its byline in a review journal anytime soon. I asked it to review a book that will be published later this spring (James Comey’s crime novel Central Park West), and the review it wrote had zero correlation to the book itself. I asked it to review Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s new book, and it responded that DeSantis is the governor of Florida, but not an author. I asked it to review Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows, one of PW ’s best books of 2022, and, again, while it gave me a review, the book it described had very little to do with the actual work. It did get a few things right (that the narrative follows a woman who is haunted by the death of her brother) but got most everything else wrong (the characters’ names, the continent where the book is set, that it’s a novel and not a short story).
Points for trying, but if a writer I’d hired had done that, they wouldn’t get another assignment. However, you don’t have to go back very far to see the technology’s potential. It does a passable job of generating write-ups of works in the public domain (Heart of Darkness is “a thought-provoking and intense novella that explores the themes of colonialism, imperialism, and the dark side of human nature”) and 20th-century classics (on Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “a powerful and important novel that is not only a masterpiece of American literature, but also a profound exploration of the lasting impact of slavery on the African American community. Morrison’s writing is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and her insights into the human psyche are both insightful and deeply moving”). It also cranked out a decent summary of a more recent novel, Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, one of PW ’s best books of 2018, and, according to ChatGPT, “a complex and thought-provoking novel that explores the experience of being Muslim in America in the aftermath of 9/11.”
As to the quality of the reviews themselves, they aren’t bad. They also aren’t good. They’re in that sludgy middle ground. The reviews tend to focus more on ideas and themes than what actually happens in a narrative, and there’s a certain bland sameness to them. They follow the classic college essay format of I’m going to tell you what I’m about to tell you, I’m telling you what I’m here to tell you, and I’m recapping what I’ve just told you. Last paragraphs generally give the game away by beginning with “Overall.”
So, no, I haven’t lost any sleep over the likelihood of an AI critic further depleting the ranks of professional reviewers. There isn’t much demand for new reviews of old books, after all. But if I were that theoretical disingenuous student who needed a quick paper on a classic and I had about two minutes to get it done without having read the book? I know what my first stop would be.
We should also acknowledge that ChatGPT isn’t meant to write criticism. It has a vast knowledge base and does an admirable job of synthesizing others’ opinions and condensing them into a digestible capsule that reads mostly like a person wrote it. But it doesn’t have its own perspective, which is, of course, something a critic must.
Even ChatGPT agrees. This is part of its response when I asked it about its limitations when it comes to writing book reviews: “While ChatGPT is an impressive tool that can generate coherent and grammatically correct text, it is not a substitute for human expertise and creativity. While it can be useful in generating preliminary drafts or providing inspiration for a review, it is important to remember its limitations and to use it as a starting point rather than a final product. Ultimately, the best book reviews are those that are written by humans with a deep understanding of the book, and a passion for sharing their insights and opinions with others.” Now, that’s a position I can get behind.
