| As a young fiction writer, I dreamed of a technology that would tell me how to get my characters from point A to point B. Could ChatGPT be it?  ChatGPT, a chatbot released by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has become a viral sensation, with people around the world feeding it writing prompts (such as “tell me a story about pineapples in the voice of Dr. Seuss”), and then sharing the sophisticated—if occasionally wrongheaded or just plain wrong—responses that it spits back out. The bot produces poetry, prose, computer code, trivia answers, surprising turns of phrase and style, all drawn from the vast language trove of the Internet. This technology has prompted pressing concerns: Will it upend Google and permanently alter the way we use the Web? Will it make the college essay obsolete? Can A.I. write for The New Yorker? All important questions, but our columnist Jay Caspian Kang has one of his own: Could ChatGPT revise and improve the novel that he wrote in his late twenties? Kang takes us through the process of tweaking his prose with the help of A.I., showing the tech’s possibilities and limitations. Along the way, he arrives at a more basic and unnerving question: If the chatbot could help him solve problems of structure and plot, and even do some of the writing for him, “Would the work itself have been diminished in any way for the reader?” We like to say that words matter, but how important is the human behind them? —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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