Critique: Móðir, kona, meyja

I recently asked ChatGPT to critique a short memoir I had written a couple of years ago. I did several iterations and the results were similar, but not always the same.

It gave me some pointers and caught a couple of typos (every writer can use a good editor, AI or not) and seemed to grasp the point of the piece (“… graceful and conceptually sound… connection without possession, warmth without permanence.”) while at the same time pushing toward an opposite effect (“… the ending could land even harder… a tactile callback would give it additional heft.”)

To be fair, the AI program didn’t know that this piece was a part of a much longer piece that was about the impressions of my trip to Iceland and not just about my meeting with “K.” The AI bot took a dim view of any levity, and criticized it as having too much biographical detail (detail that I thought essential to give the poor reader some background the story.) ChatGPT also wanted me to insert lines of dialog which, with my imperfect memory, would have been putting words in her mouth.

Overall, ChatGPT's impressions were pretty accurate:

Móðir, kona, meyja is a tender, reflective memoir that succeeds most where it honors duration: the slow accrual of familiarity, care, and asymmetry that defines many online-to-offline friendships. The piece’s greatest strength is its emotional decency. You are consistently attentive to K as a full human being rather than a symbol or muse, and the essay never tips into self-dramatization. The closing metaphor of parallel stars is quietly earned and thematically apt.

But it still insisted on trying to shape it into something more rigid than what this gentle meeting was:

That said, the essay could gain clarity and resonance by tightening its temporal structure, sharpening its thematic spine…

My impression of its suggestions that they were akin to shaving the fuzz off a tennis ball. Assuming that most new internet writing will now be run through this kind of filtration, I’ll be on the lookout for this kind of AI masculine bias.