Chat GPT Can't Do This

It can't walk onto the deck of a ship and see a man sitting outside a dormant gun battery. 

It doesn't notice his leather skin, tanned during the seven years he’s volunteered at this historic site. 

It doesn't hear him tell me he joined the Navy in 1962 or imagine what it must have been like when he was sitting off the coast of Cuba as Soviet ships came knocking. 

It can't ask what that moment was like and listen to him explain that, like everyone else, he thought the world was coming to an end. 

ChatGPT doesn't see a 5th grader's jaw drop when I tell him the man I've been talking to was in the middle of an event that seems like ancient history. 

It can't see the look of pride on that man's face when he tells the story of the battleship he's charged with watching over. It can’t picture the carnage he describes when explaining how the ship took bomb after bomb and suffered waves of Kamikaze attacks but still stayed afloat. 

It doesn't understand the shine in his eyes or his excitement from telling someone these stories. How he stands, cane in hand, with his “Retired Navy” hat on, talking to a family that stopped to ask him a question. 

ChatGPT doesn't know what's it like to walk through the bowels of a long-retired aircraft carrier. It can't smell the mix of steel, oil, and grease, so tangible you can taste it. 

It can't bend down, ducking through doorways and into cramped spaces where men had to do jobs in impossible circumstances and conditions.

It can't picture what it must have been like for the boiler room crew, constantly wiping sweat from their brows and knowing in the back of their mind that, at any moment, an unseen death could come above or below. 

ChatGPT can't climb the steps to a B-25 bomber, squeeze into a turret,  and get a glimpse of the terror a gunner would face when they saw a Japanese fighter dive out of the sun. 

It doesn't look around the floating steel hulk and consider what life was like for young men to wake up every day in the middle of the ocean and wonder if death would have their number. 

ChatGPT can't walk the flight deck with 11-year-olds, their eyes squinted as they ask how they're supposed to stand up in the winds that push them back. 

It doesn't find itself thinking about my Grandpa and his life on a ship during the world's greatest conflict. It doesn't remember the stories he told, how he described the sound of German bombers passing over his ship on their way to drop a lethal payload on the citizens of London. 

It can't hear him tell about one of his buddies who went AWOL every time those planes crossed the Channel, the drone of hundreds of twin engines too much for him to handle. 

ChatGPT can’t go on class field trips and spend time with kids eager to learn. It doesn't leave a place feeling a sense of respect and an eagerness to capture the stories of the past before they fade from memory. 

It saddens me that we live in a world more fascinated by the responses a machine can produce than by the stories and life found in another human being. 

A culture that wants to find ways to exploit artificial intelligence for profit and sometimes evil. A society that looks for short cuts instead of dedication to learning and craft. 

And instead of sitting across for someone for a cup of coffee or on the aft of a ship and having a conversation, we flee to corners of the internet in search of connection and answers from things that don't even know we exist.