The Day I Bit the Apple

From academic purist to secret ChatGPT user, a writer learns the hard way about the perils of outsourcing their own voice.

- Anwesh Banerjee

Three years ago, I was seated with my friends—easily irritated, mostly daydreaming, yet surprisingly social nerds—pouring over a list of study guides in the never-updated University of Delhi library catalogue. The task was simple: To find a critic who could make sense of English literary scholar Maurice Bowra's dense promulgations on the Romantic imagination. Salvation appeared in the footnotes of a Routledge guide, and a digital copy was soon circulated on WhatsApp via JSTOR (that ever-reliable friend we owe our CGPAs to).

But, a few days later, I found myself in an odd pickle. From being at the epicenter of that previous search for meaning, I was now lingering on the outer rings of a circle gathered around a classmate, relaying tales of one ChatGPT. The act of heroism in point? Its ability to (within mere seconds) simplify Bowra's labyrinthine thoughts with (supposedly) great lucidity. Looking back, that was perhaps the moment this strange beast waltzed into my life.

Very soon, peers whose academic rigour I had long-admired and aspired towards began churning out essays that leant heavily on the findings of this digital seductress. Once upon a time, those who had spent hours straining their eyes in a bid to comprehend thirty pages worth of words, now found ways of engineering specific prompts to get artificial intelligence to summarise their contents into parsed bullet points. The result was an odd mix of success and fierce backlash.