When I sat down to write this issue’s editor’s page, my newly updated version of Microsoft Word opened with a small window asking me, “What would you like Copilot to draft.” Copilot is Word’s artificial intelligence (AI) companion. You give it parameters, and it spits out a composition for you, no thinking required. I’ve never used it—or any AI—to do my writing for me. I don’t intend to, either, but when Copilot made me that offer, I was curious to see what it could do. I typed, “Draft a 500-word essay on the significance of the schooner BRILLIANT to sail training.”
Within about five seconds, I was reading 500 words of somewhat accurate, coldly composed, grammatically perfect, sleep-inducing tripe about the schooner BRILLIANT. It had no personality and was loaded with repetitive triple-object series such as “…skills, values, and inspiration; navigate, handle sails, and maintain the vessel; resilience, environmental awareness, and the value of skill….” It had no quotations nor personal experiences to back up those assertions of values. It had no soul.
As an antidote, I thought back to one still morning sometime in the late 1980s when I awoke aboard a classic English cutter in the harbor in Marion, Massachusetts.