a lyric essay in one paragraph, repeatedly revised (edits indicated in blue) 

I have been teaching my students that humans are storytellers by nature. My students write muddled first drafts that I cherish because this is the first layer they lay down of a memory that they must rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, to figure out what it is they really mean. 

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I have been teaching my students that humans are storytellers by nature, and then one week I tell them about ChatGPT and artificially generated stories. ChatGPT writes clean prose—no typos, no grammatical errors, no awkward syntax in English—and I have no qualms mocking this text for what it is: a pastiche of natural language, meant to serve whom? I cherish my students. Truly. They write the first layers of stories that they must rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, to figure out what it is they really mean, and there is no time, there is no money in the world that shows them what they do is worth something. 

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Humans are storytellers by nature. We have evolved this way. A story is an efficient means of explaining to someone what (not) to do to survive. We do not have all the time in the world to learn from indigestion that those mushrooms are inedible but these ones will unfold the universe if you stare into a fire—we take each other’s word for it. One week someone uses ChatGPT to write clean prose—no typos, no grammatical errors, no awkward syntax in English—about mushrooms, and because the text is entirely made up, it tells you to eat poison. There is no time, there is no money in the world that would compel me to tell such a story to another person.

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Humans are storytellers by nature. Does that mean we are all liars? I ask my students, if a story makes you feel something, that emotional state your in, that feeling your feeling, is that not true even if the story is made up? One week someone uses ChatGPT to write clean prose—no typos, no grammatical errors, no awkward syntax in English—about love, and it feels so good to see themself on the page because everyone else has ignored them, and is that not reason enough to keep using this machine to tell you stories?

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That emotional state you’re in, that feeling you’re feeling, is embarrassment about your typos.

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That feeling you’re feeling, Geetha, is rage, because you cherish your students, and storytelling. You want to make mistakes. These are the first layers of a story you lay down and you have to rewrite this, over and over, to explain what you really mean. 

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I have been teaching my students that humans are storytellers by nature and that ChatGPT is neither a storyteller nor a product of nature. But I have to stop myself, because humans are nature and this means that everything they produce, every artifact, every artifice, every AI machine that spits words and sweeps pixels into impossible mountainscapes, is also nature. 

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I have been thinking about my digital carbon footprint and how this, directly, will be the death of nature as I know it. 

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When I teach my students about ChatGPT, they already know—or intuit—that it doesn’t belong here, in this classroom where I tell them that their words matter. I tell them, their shittiest first drafts matter. Dear reader, these words are a shitty first draft because when I began this essay I did not know where it was going to end. That’s part of the process. I am teaching my students that layers matter. The first thing you say about a subject is not the last word you’ll write about it. The last word you write will be read by someone else and that, perhaps, is their first word on the subject. Cherish this process.

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I have been teaching my students about ChatGPT since 2023, and every time I do, I ask ChatGPT to write me the story of someone escaping a flood caused by a hurricane. In 2023, its responses were banal, cliché, unspecific, unrealistically optimistic. In March 2024, its responses were marginally less unspecific, but still banal, cliché, unable to provoke the reader into sitting with trauma, unable to present an ending that felt messy and unresolved. Life is not neat, for most of us. This is why good fiction makes us cry—because someone captured, with accuracy, how untidy it all feels. This is truth in fiction. 

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I have been teaching my students about ChatGPT since 2023, and in October 2024 I ask it to write a story about someone escaping a flood caused by a hurricane, but told through the POV of the photographs hanging from the walls of the house. Our protagonist is a man named Jake. It could have been Maya, or Carlos, or Geetha (unlikely), but in this story, his name is Jake, and as he frantically gathers his supplies to escape his flooding house, the frail voice of his mother calls from the hallway. Leave me behind, she says, I am too weak. Dear reader, what do you think Jake does?

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When I taught my students about ChatGPT and fiction writing this semester, I told them I had to concede it was better now than it had been before. My object lessons about cliché felt weaker—one of the trees in one of the stories had been rendered like an animal scraping at the window of a house, begging to come in. My gripes about unspecific storytelling were mollified when I asked for a story set in the Everglades, and the machine rendered palm trees, mangroves, sawgrass. Oh, sure, the protagonist was banal, but if I asked ChatGPT to write a story where they failed to escape a flood caused by a hurricane, it showed me how they drowned in the attic with their dog Rufus. 

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But what about Jake’s mother, you ask?

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When I taught my students about ChatGPT this semester I showed them a story it wrote about Jake packing frantically to leave his house, with the text moving deftly between his present action and the memories caught in photographs on the wall. Remember? I asked for the POV of the photos. Child with a gap-tooth smile under a yellow umbrella (or was he wearing a yellow shirt?). Child, older, with his father, fishing. Child, yet older, with his mother on the porch steps. Remember the mother? At the midpoint of the story, she tells her son to leave her behind, for she is too weak. Does Jake wade back through the waters to hoist her frail body onto his back and blunder through the wash back to the front door? Does Jake beg and plead for her to reconsider, for she has locked the door to sacrifice her life for him? Does Jake seize his mother into a hug like a bear claw trap so they could die together? No, reader. Jake does what his mother asks him to. He wraps up the last of his supplies, battles out the front door to a waiting boat, and drifts in it as the waters rise, consuming the house, the photographs, the mother, and Jake has no reaction to the real loss at all. 

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When I teach my students about storytelling, I trust them to understand the difference between truth in fiction and lies. They are kind to each other, and will not rip each other’s stories to shreds. When I teach them about ChatGPT, I want them to eviscerate it. 

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ChatGPT is a strange pastiche of nature, I think. It is mimicking language and memory and style and maybe, one day, even something as ineffable to a computer as human behavior and motivation. But when I teach my students about ChatGPT and storytelling, I always make them read that chapter in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, the one where a family escapes a flood caused by a hurricane, and I tell them that the story exists because of rage, and because of love. I do not remember Ward’s exact words on the matter but I do remember this: she wrote that story to personify the poor, Black people who’d lost everything in that storm caused by climate change (Katrina, do you remember?) and the United States’ negligence of social and environmental infrastructure that would protect everyone, especially the most marginalized, from disasters the least marginalized created. She said her people had been portrayed on the news as looters. She showed us who people really are. Esch, Skeetah (and his companion dog, China), Randall, Junior, these unforgettable siblings with their ferocious love for each other, for their mother (dead), for their father (depressed, maimed at the time of the story’s telling). At the climax of the novel, the family scramble across the canopy of a submerged live oak that stretches from the roof of their flooded home to their grandmother’s house. The world is a howl of water and they may all perish, except that Ward connects them, in one sprawling, page-long sentence that weaves their individual bodies into a chain, a web, a collective entity that pushes, pushes, pushes each of its component members toward survival. I tell my students, go read that book to understand what motivates storytellers. 

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I have been teaching my students that humans are storytellers by nature, and that we are motivated by what burns inside us. Most of the time, we are not encouraged to feed what burns. Economic forces compel our time toward other pursuits. Maximize efficiency, learn to make ChatGPT work for you. What will we do with all that saved time, I wonder? Make books that no one can afford to read? Jesmyn Ward’s exquisite corpus has been consumed by ChatGPT and that enrages me too. 

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I am trying to teach my students that humans are storytellers by nature, and I am one of many people who cherishes that fact. I am here to nurture this process in my students. I am trying to show, by erasing and rewriting words I’m not fully certain about, that even if I don’t know exactly what I feel about living in a world where stories can be generated by prompt engineering, where the least marginalized will always profit off the work of the most marginalized, I don’t want someone’s machine to rob me of the time and effort and satisfaction it takes for me to figure out storytelling for myself. Our stories predate computer chips, cloud storage, and large language models. Our languages predate storytelling. Our genes encode a phenomenal property: the ability to pass information (knowledge!) from one person to the next (across generations!) through memories, songs, jokes, poems, metaphysical and metaphorical tools that are continually modified to suit our present-day needs. Such a strange artifact of nature—writing down an idea that will birth another idea, through gradual mutation, into endless, unknowable, and familiar forms.  

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I am teaching my students that we are human. We pride ourselves on self-improvement. We do not forget our mothers. We tell stories to keep each other alive. Cherish this process.