‘Why did you write it?’
As an English professor, the YouTube video essayist known as ‘josh (with parentheses)’ has, over the past few years, witnessed a faculty-wide panic about students using large language models (LLMs) to plagiarise assignments. The experience inspired him to create this sprawling video essay on the meaning of LLMs – what they can do and, more to the point, what they can’t. To him, this includes the very act of writing itself, which he contends, borrowing the words of Stephen King, requires a ‘meeting of the minds’. The entertaining and insightful piece spans the poetry of Gertrude Stein and contemporary ‘brainrot’ videos, all while he prods at ChatGPT and his friends. Travelling to some surprising places, he generates an unusually perceptive meditation on what might, at first glance, seem like a near-exhausted topic.
