The following is adapted from You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, by Kelsey McKinney, published on February 11, 2025.
The robots are always on the brink of destroying every creative career. Right now, the evil robot du jour is artificial intelligence. You can have AI write you a play, or generate an image of you hugging Beyoncé, or bring your favorite comedian back from the dead to perform a new one-hour special. AI-powered tools and platforms like Adobe Sensei, DALL-E 2, ChatGPT, and Khroma are already being used by creative teams in companies around the world to do all of these things. After Scarlett Johansson refused to voice a new talking OpenAI bot, the company released an artificial intelligence voice that sounded just like her. She protested and immediately hired legal counsel.
Whether any of the creative products made by AI are actually good is debatable. I have yet to see any art made by AI that caused me to feel anything at all. But the fear that the people with money in seats of power are going to decide that mediocre art that is made cheaply by a machine is a better investment than actual people who cost more money to employ but might make better art feels real. In 2023, Goldman Sachs published a report that estimated that 300 million jobs are at risk of having some (or all) of their work conducted by AI automation. That’s a terrifying statistic to anyone with a creative job. There are already so few of them. As news article after news article was published about how AI was going to demolish creative industries, I began to feel worried. The terror coursing through my veins beckoned me to google, “Can robots write?” And learning that led me to googling, “Can robots gossip?” Thank god I have two jobs!
From the search results, I read an article about how robots might be used in caregiving scenarios in the future, and a study about the data privacy ethics of teaching robots to talk about their other conversations with people, and about how robots can collect more information about us than another human could because we don’t perceive robots as being judgmental. I wasn’t sure any of that felt relevant, and none of these articles satisfied my curiosity, which led me to the only robot I know: ChatGPT.
The chatbot, developed by OpenAI and launched in late 2022, learns from human feedback, and its core aim is to mimic human conversations. It can write computer programs, answer short essay questions, and do your homework for you. So I decided to do my own research and see if ChatGPT was capable of gossiping. I typed into the little box in the program, “Can you tell me gossip?”
ChatGPT did not like this question. “I’m here to provide helpful and informative responses. Gossiping about individuals is not respectful or productive. If you have any questions or topics you’d like to discuss, feel free to ask, and I’d be more than happy to assist you,” it said. ChatGPT then labeled our conversation “No Gossip, Helpful Info.” OK, drama queen!
Personally, I found this very rude and also incorrect. Gossiping about individuals can be positive, so that’s not disrespectful. And all gossip is kind of productive in that anthropologists have argued that gossip is both important to our interactions in society and an essential part of being human. I told ChatGPT this, and immediately it recanted. Deciding to agree with me, it listed five important functions gossip has in society: social bonding, information exchange, norm enforcement, entertainment and distraction, and social learning.
Having reached common ground, I asked my new best friend ChatGPT for gossip again, but it still refused. “I understand your curiosity, but I must reiterate that I’m here to provide respectful and informative assistance,” it said. Loser shit, but fine.
Feeling we had hit a wall, I asked ChatGPT to tell me the story of The Epic of Gilgamesh. If it refused to gossip, at least it could tell me a story. What is gossip if not a story?
The Epic of Gilgamesh is my favorite oral legend. It is a Sumerian poem that dates back to around 2100 BCE. It is comprised of many tablets, some of which are still missing. Tablets with transcriptions of the story appear over more than 500 years, and translations of them are still being made and evolving to this day. A recent translation by Sophus Helle coupled modern language with the absurdity of the plot in such a way that it was hard to remember that the story was 4,000 years old. It is unbelievably funny. At its core, Gilgamesh is an enemies-to-bromance narrative about two best buddies, Enkidu and Gilgamesh, who are very horny and want to fight gods. At the end of the story Gilgamesh finally finishes his epic quest to obtain immortality in the form of an edible plant. One day, while he is bathing, a snake steals the plant. Helle’s translation, as I read it, didn’t just feel like an oral story; it felt like gossip. So maybe, I thought, ChatGPT could get closer with a little guidance.
ChatGPT told me the legend of Gilgamesh in a bulleted list. Not only was it much less dramatic than the real story of Gilgamesh, it was dull as rocks. I might as well have read the first draft of a Spark Notes summary written by a 10th grader. Why would ChatGPT say, “Enkidu lives in the wilderness and initially possesses the strength and instincts of an animal,” instead of being specific and noting that Enkidu was covered in hair and lived so much like the wild animals that in order to get him into polite society, a hunter had to get the king to arrange for a temple prostitute to come for six days and seven nights and bang Enkidu until he was calm? ChatGPT’s version of the story had none of the bro-love of the original, none of the heartbreak, and none of the joy. It was stripped down to its facts, the artistry of thousands of years of human work removed in an instant.
This wasn’t entirely surprising. ChatGPT, famously, cannot write well. While it can pass the bar exam, the SAT, and more than a dozen AP exams with no problem, even a new evolution of ChatGPT (GPT-4) struggles with essays. It scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal section of the GRE and only in the 54th percentile on the writing portion. It scored in lower percentiles on AP English Literature and AP English Language. It knows vocabulary, but not craft.
Knowing this, I still wanted to see if ChatGPT could tell me The Epic of Gilgamesh like a story. Specifically, I wanted it recounted in an entertaining way. So I asked ChatGPT to tell me the story of Gilgamesh like it was gossip, and ... well.
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Copyright © 2025 by Kelsey McKinney. Used by arrangement with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
