I’m a professional proofreader and editor, and I love this piece. As a linguist I also seem to have a sensitivity or “allergy” (LOL) to AI, it lacks a certain quality that natural human language has, and I think you correctly identify this as a lack of unique individual direct life experience and viewpoint. When I work with authors my goal is to give the work a beautiful finish that also allows the reader to see the natural grain underneath (to borrow a metaphor from woodworking). I don’t want to sanitize or homogenize the work in a way that erases the author’s unique humanity, which is what I notice in AI generated works. My YA kiddo plans to study astrophysics and tells me that AI is fantastic for improving the quality of telescope images and for quantum computing but just rolls her eyes at using it for human language applications.
Ah so you notice that AI flavor of writing too? See I pointed it out to some writers and some commenters got really angry at me. A lot of people really liked the piece.
And I wasn't really attacking the guy either, I was just encouraging him to trust his own voice and skills. Anyway it made me ponder to what degree AI writing is enjoyed or disliked.
I experimented with my wife who is an avid reader and has a good sense of good writing IMHO. And I noticed it was a bit of a mix. She did think some of my writing got better with AI use and other writing ended up sounding overdone, repetitive etc.
In short, AI doesn't seem to be exclusively bad, but I would say you definitely need to know what you are doing. You need to be able to identify when it does a bad job and correct it. In this sense understanding good writing still matters.
My approach has been to write my piece first and then use AI to prettify what I wrote a bit. That way the overall thing, thoughts, argument development etc is still mine. I am more skeptical towards having AI write a whole article from scratch from keywords.
I have to say it does a pretty good job of writing trivial things like advertising copy. My ex used ChatGPT to write a radio ad for a plumbing service and it produced a hilarious ad! Not the sort of humor most humans would come up with but still pretty funny. I wouldn’t bother with it for anything more meaningful though.
Yeah it is tricky to write large more complex pieces. One thing I have done is going through my text with individual chunks. But that is tricky too because it rewrites them without knowing what the previous text was. So it messed up due to lacking context. But if you give it more text to process at a time, it often misses the nuance of the argument or point you make.
I have kind of gotten it to work through much hassle. It is definitely not easy to get high quality out of AI though in my view. You can do it but it is kind of a skill onto itself. We are still far away from just click a button and write an amazing novel or long form article.
It can certainly write something that sounds superficially awesome, but as you read it more detailed you realize that stuff just doesn't hang together properly.
I’m a professional proofreader and editor, and I love this piece. As a linguist I also seem to have a sensitivity or “allergy” (LOL) to AI, it lacks a certain quality that natural human language has, and I think you correctly identify this as a lack of unique individual direct life experience and viewpoint. When I work with authors my goal is to give the work a beautiful finish that also allows the reader to see the natural grain underneath (to borrow a metaphor from woodworking). I don’t want to sanitize or homogenize the work in a way that erases the author’s unique humanity, which is what I notice in AI generated works. My YA kiddo plans to study astrophysics and tells me that AI is fantastic for improving the quality of telescope images and for quantum computing but just rolls her eyes at using it for human language applications.
Ah so you notice that AI flavor of writing too? See I pointed it out to some writers and some commenters got really angry at me. A lot of people really liked the piece.
And I wasn't really attacking the guy either, I was just encouraging him to trust his own voice and skills. Anyway it made me ponder to what degree AI writing is enjoyed or disliked.
I experimented with my wife who is an avid reader and has a good sense of good writing IMHO. And I noticed it was a bit of a mix. She did think some of my writing got better with AI use and other writing ended up sounding overdone, repetitive etc.
In short, AI doesn't seem to be exclusively bad, but I would say you definitely need to know what you are doing. You need to be able to identify when it does a bad job and correct it. In this sense understanding good writing still matters.
My approach has been to write my piece first and then use AI to prettify what I wrote a bit. That way the overall thing, thoughts, argument development etc is still mine. I am more skeptical towards having AI write a whole article from scratch from keywords.
I have to say it does a pretty good job of writing trivial things like advertising copy. My ex used ChatGPT to write a radio ad for a plumbing service and it produced a hilarious ad! Not the sort of humor most humans would come up with but still pretty funny. I wouldn’t bother with it for anything more meaningful though.
Yeah it is tricky to write large more complex pieces. One thing I have done is going through my text with individual chunks. But that is tricky too because it rewrites them without knowing what the previous text was. So it messed up due to lacking context. But if you give it more text to process at a time, it often misses the nuance of the argument or point you make.
I have kind of gotten it to work through much hassle. It is definitely not easy to get high quality out of AI though in my view. You can do it but it is kind of a skill onto itself. We are still far away from just click a button and write an amazing novel or long form article.
It can certainly write something that sounds superficially awesome, but as you read it more detailed you realize that stuff just doesn't hang together properly.