Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. From videos that pop up on your social media feed to your car’s steering wheel, gently (and sometimes not so gently) correcting your driving. I recently discovered a song I really liked, only to realize the “group” had no tour dates, no band or lead singer. It was all created at the hands of someone really good with music industry AI tools.
On a recent trip to Vegas, I rode in a Zoox, a driverless car. According to the website, the robotaxi’s “maintain a symbiotic relationship with organisms in its surrounding habitat.” The first few rides were great until I found myself wondering about the “decisions” the software was making as we waited for the computer to find an opening for a left turn in heavy traffic. We made it, but it was tight. As a human, I would have done it differently.
AI is also in the written word. For the college student who needs a 2000 word paper analyzing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, ChatGPT can create one in a minute and a half. I would have loved this tool as a young college student in the early eighties. I distinctly remember hours of stress I enduring writing a paper on Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.
For a writer, AI can create poems, songs, screenplays, and yes, even whole books. Online, one company advertises it can create and print your book in just 2 minutes. Just answer few questions and AI will do the rest.
Aids for writers go way back. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was published in 1852. I imagine 19th century writers all over that thing, looking for just the right word (or term, expression, idiom, remark). I’m sure Tolkien and Lewis used each other’s advice during their Inklings meetings to correct and change their work.
Microsoft Word first included spell check in 1985. Of course, if your science paper was about “planets” and you typed “plants” instead, you were out of luck.
Pro Writing Aid, a tool known to writers, will tell you not only the words that are misspelled, but so much more, like the average sentence length and if your document contains too many sentences that start with -ing words.
Can AI make it better? Maybe. Will it make it different? For sure. The question for every writer is where to draw the line. How much is too much help?
It’s easy to step over the line when using these more sophisticated tools. “Suggest rephrases” buttons can be tempting. Copy and paste so simple, so efficient. But at a cost.
When writers use AI to create content, they lose their unique voice, what separates their work from everyone else’s. Anyone can use AI. Only you can write the words and phrases that are distinctively you.
The line is constantly shifting. Stay vigilant to keep your voice in your writing. There’s only one you.