ChatGPT can’t make you a crossword puzzle
I learned this the hard way when I signed up to be the Daily’s second-ever Crossword and Games editor. Notably, I took the position not knowing how to write a crossword.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll have the positive spirit and can-do attitude to learn on the job. I am nobody if not a woman with gumption.”
Famous last words. Between accepting the role and publishing my first crossword, I got terribly, horribly, awfully depressed. In lieu of details, I’ll tell you this much: when I moved into my apartment, the overhead light in my room didn’t work. It would illuminate my room for a few minutes and then start flickering madly. My roommates and I called it “rave light.” I could not scrape together enough willpower to change the light until the end of fall quarter. Until then, I sat around in the dark every evening, though my desk lamp helped as best it could.
Okay, I’m done being sad. Back to crosswords. Because I was too busy wallowing in shadow to learn how to write a crossword, I was rushing to write one the night it would be published. Uh oh! In a desperate, self-pitying haze, I turned to an “AI Crossword Generator” I found, put in the theme, and hit “generate.”
To its credit, it generated a file that included crossed words. But it made one of those weird, misshapen crosswords you might have gotten to test vocab in high school Spanish. It has nothing that makes traditional American-style crosswords — the kind you see in The New York Times — special. No rotational symmetry, no fun clues, no wordplay.
In a real crossword, every single letter in every single square is there for a reason. If you remove one square, you have to remove another square, 180 degrees away, to maintain symmetry. A good puzzle takes ages to construct because everything must weave together perfectly. You can’t get too precious about any given word, because you might have to delete it to make other words work.
And sure, your computer might be able to suggest words that fit with your crossword so far, but it can’t generate the whole thing outright. The constructor has to take the lead on creating the puzzle. I think it must feel like sculpting something out of clay: shedding and adding material until you end up with a cohesive work.
That first puzzle, which I cobbled together after the whole AI plan failed, does not look like a cohesive work. It looks more like if you made a cupcake out of Play-Doh and then sat on it by accident. Please don’t go back and play it. It’s really, really bad. There’s too much negative space. I didn’t know how to write a crossword puzzle (I still barely do, but my new ones are better).
I still shudder to look at the first puzzles I wrote, but I’m not angry at them. My first, ugly grid is something only a person could make. ChatGPT couldn’t make that.
It reminds me of many papers I submitted during my time at Northwestern, written in Celsius-fueled delirium the nights before they were due. Even if they’re not my finest work, I still get to call them my work. When I was too depressed to change a lightbulb (there’s a joke in there somewhere), making bad essays and bad crosswords all by myself helped keep me moving. It reminded me that my brain was capable of more than generating sadness.
I do not hate convenience, and I am certainly not a luddite. I have used generative AI before, and I recognize its utility in certain situations. But it makes me just a little bit sad to see people ask a language model to “create” something on their behalf. Creating something, including writing something, requires a willingness to sit with and evaluate your thoughts. A willingness to delete things that don’t work and try new things that might. Don’t offload that thinking to an algorithm that can’t wrap its code around a crossword. That includes your homework.
We’re approaching a world where many of the things around us are generated. Why not create something instead?
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