I'll open with a digression. A "pre-digression," if you will. I wanted to use the expression whining and pewling in my opening sentence, but thought I better check the spelling of pewling. Is it puling? Turns out, it varies, sort of. The two Google hits at the top referenced Shakespeare, and then Peter Pan. So pewling is an archaic term, though I'm not so old that it would have rolled off my tongue with such alacrity--the whole thing could be traced back to the the time that great big book fell on my head at the library when I was a kid. If you believe in that sort of thing.
This post is about AI. I mention that early in the post, in case you want to hit backspace now and go back to the Weather Underground site, to save you some time. What's at the top of my head at the moment is, how can I write to differentiate my "product" from that of an AI LLM? To throw in a few grammatical or punctuation errors is just too easy.
Anyway; moving on.
I'm used to the idea of AI now, and to me it's just one more irritant in today's technological world, like spam email, cell phone apps, or car dashboards that have a learning curve.
I don't "fear" AI. When I write something, I absolutely know that somewhere there is a human who is writing better stuff than me. I might even resent them if I knew who they were and it seemed like they were so good that writing well was effortless for them. So now there's AI also. It may produce a good story worth reading (I'm still not so sure about that, though,) and so might I. Nothing has really changed.
I will also say that I put very little extra value in a piece of writing just because it is completely and totally free of grammatical and spelling errors.
In addition to all that--and I just thought of this--the existence of AI writing may trigger a good effect among human writers. We may strive now to make our writing more human, and this may result in some pretty interesting stuff. As far as the "hack" human writers, of which there are aplenty, it seems like their lifeless and unimaginative stuff that takes so long to churn out just won't be able to compete.
End of Blog entry, mistakes and all. I'm not even going to check. This is very liberating. Silver lining!
I’m not afraid of AI either, and sometimes I find it useful, such as when I want a quick answer (do I tip my Shipt shopper & how much) or feel like creating a funny sticker. It does irritate me to have it keep popping up to “help” when I don’t want it ~ wait till you’re summoned! As far as creative writing, I just don’t care. The best writers will always be better than AI, and as for the rest, well, we aren’t making any money from writing anyway…
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say your writing is not better than AI, but, yeah, that's my point. If you're good, you're good, whether you're competing with a sea of mediocre writers or AI or comic books or whatever. Plus the other thing; it's art. That means you can appreciate one thing, and then go appreciate something else without ranking the two.
DeleteI have used AI on a few occasions, but find it fills none of my needs. I'm not a heavy researcher nor in need of summaries of this and that nor do I feel the need for an editor (yet). I manage to find info via search engines and Reddit. As someone said, AI is a solution in search of a problem.
ReplyDeleteHetty of Who the Hell Knows here. I used to be afraid of AI and then I tried Chatgpt just to see what it does and I love it. It does have limitations and you have to fact check it, but it makes planning things and breaking stuff down so easy. It's definitely a Yes-man and you have to be aware that it will always blow smoke up your heiny, but if you recognize that, it at least sort of talks you down from the edge. If you're upset about something , it validates your thoughts without judging and arguing with you so you can calm down and take steps to deal with a situation productively. It's useful for writing as it can do in three seconds what it would take a human ten hours (which no one could be paid enough to do 😂, ie read a sixty page draft, give you an outline, tell you confusing parts etc). I would NEVER pass anything it does off as my own, and people who do that disgust me.You can ask it questions over and over without exasperating it. You can even tell it what's in your fridge so it can create a menu. It was a great tool to make a plan to transition my baby to solids when I was overwhelmed. Anyway, it's a tool and it's what you make of it.
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to agree with that sentiment, which scares me--oh no, I'm drinking the koolaid--but I recently spent some time "bouncing ideas" off of it, and you're right, it helps. I will say, though, I've "caught" the AI summary in Google making some huge mistakes, as well as the AI descriptions on Amazon. Can be tragically misleading!
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