If ChatGPT is letting everyone into the Erudite Essay Club, then I'm out!

There is one facet of essay writing that ChatGPT will forever destroy:
— Intelligence-Signaling —

There are countless subtle syntactic, semantic, and structural properties that must be conformed to so as to achieve an essay displaying a high level of erudition.

Falter on any of these and you signal that you’re not a highly educated, high class person.

But now anyone with even a poor command of essay writing can scratch together instructions to ChatGPT to build a stylistically eloquent and high-brow essay for them on any topic.

If this “low-brow” writer knows his or her shit, and is genuinely a novel thinker, then the substance of the essay will be something ChatGPT could never do.

Such a writer would historically have had trouble convincing anyone, because — whether we realize it or not — we all partially judge the content of an essay by the writing ability displayed by the writer.

And there almost surely is a strong correlation. Getting all those subtle rules right is hard, and, if you can’t, perhaps it’s also unlikely you can handle the complex substantive issues the essay is actually about.

But that correlation is soon to be no more, because ChatGPT undermines the honesty of this sort of intelligence signaling.

And that means not only that it levels the playing field for original minds that happened to not get the education needed to play on that intelligence-signaling essay playing field…

…but also that those that can play on that playing field simply don’t need to any longer.

Yeah, I can write essays, and I can make it sound like I’m a professor. But, even so, that takes some effort. What’s the point of that now?!

The rules governing essay writing will quickly evolve, with this traditional intelligence-signaling constraint no longer active.

It’s a license to get right to the point — to break whatever rules there might be to simply optimize that the reader gets it.

And that’s a good thing. (We’ll find other ways to honestly signal the same sorts of things soon enough.)