I’m still not sure whether I’m excited or bored by the explosion of generative AI writing tools.
I certainly do not fear them and I’m not a luddite. The concept is fascinating, and the idea of efficiency gains is always promising, as resources get freed up to do new and interesting things.
As a writer, it doesn’t bother me. But it doesn’t really appeal to me either. I write for me. I write because the process of writing transforms my thinking. Outsourcing it to an algorithm doesn’t sound useful to me in this regard. It’d be like having a robot do push-ups on my behalf.
Then again, I use a computer, a word processor, and automatic spell-checking tools. Would writing with ink and quill be a better form of exercise? If not, why would adding autocomplete, or auto-generation of words be any different?
I’m not sure if and to what extent it is, and I don’t feel the need to have an answer. For now, I don’t have any interest in using AI as a writer.
There might be some exceptions. Some kinds of writing for business aren’t the same kind of exercise, and are not done for my own benefit like personal writing. Summarizing an article or video into a post for a company social media page, for example, is about maximizing value to the audience, not indulging the writer. If an AI can either do it better straight up, or do it well enough that the dip in quality is smaller than the value of what the employee can do with the time freed up, it could make sense to use it.
As a reader, I have not yet read anything AI generated that seemed worth my time. I’ve seen plenty of formulaic AI generated Tweet threads that seem plausibly human, which is an impressive feat, but they’ve all been the kind of threads I find uninteresting when written by humans anyway.
Most of the other AI generated stuff I’ve read is just too weird. It’s got that uncanny valley feeling. All the pieces are there but they just don’t quite connect right. It feels not so much like crappy writing, but crappy thinking dressed up in decent words.
It’s possible I’ve enjoyed reading stuff that I didn’t know was AI generated. But the percentage of content online that I enjoy reading in general seems to be dropping fast. I have sometimes suspected that it’s because more and more of it is partially AI generated, but that’s just a guess. It could be that there is just more bad writing out there, or less good writing, or that I’m getting old and senile.
I’m open to plenty of interesting things from generative AI, but so far, I just haven’t found anything to make me care much about it as a writer or reader.
I suspect as things progress, the best way to think about it will not be as writing, but as a new art form. The interplay of human words, images, prompts, and data being turned into a string of words generated by code could result in some really interesting, beautiful, and useful things that are net new, not merely replacements for current forms of writing. The way radio didn’t replace books, or TV radio.
Or it could destroy language and meaning itself and turn us into babbling idiots who experience cognitive decline with each generation and communicate entirely by blinking and grunting at computers that decide what we meant by it and go do it.
Kidding. I think.