Stop Using AI To Replace Writers

Do you know what I think these days whenever I come across a beautifully heartfelt poem or short story online? 

Okay, that’s definitely not AI. 

And usually, I’m right. AI has a way of sucking all the human imperfections, the feeling, the rawness, out of something. However, as much as I hate to admit this, once or twice I was duped. It was AI. I generally pride myself on being able to tell the difference between something created by a person and something that…wasn’t. But sometimes AI can trick even the best of us. I’ve seen comments on clearly AI-generated images or writing that go something like:

This is so inspiring! 

You’re so talented!

You have such a way with words!

The issue is that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. While detecting it in images, for instance, it often can be relatively straightforward to spot when something is AI, if you are trained and know exactly what to look for. Even if all of us were educated in the classic signs (missing or added fingers, unnatural textures, background inconsistencies, etc), AI is improving every day. Soon, even the most polished of professionals might not be able to distinguish what’s real and what’s generated, and this problem will just keep getting worse.

In terms of writing, as of now, much of what ChatGPT pumps out lacks a certain quality. It lacks emotional intelligence and life experience; it lacks what makes humans such good storytellers. Here’s an example of what ChatGPT gave me after I gave it the prompt “Write a poem about music”:

Music whispers, music roars,

It opens hearts, it unlocks doors.

A drumbeat pounds, a violin cries,

A melody that never dies.

No words are needed, yet we feel,

Its magic deep, its power real.

It’s a poem, that’s for sure. The words are real words strung together to make a real sentence. It’s readable. It certainly does its job in writing “a poem about music.” But something is missing here. It doesn’t feel new or exciting, but rather full of cliches and shallow language. This seems to be a trademark of AI-generated writing––it’s too clean. 

A major issue I have with AI-generated writing is that much of it comes from real people. It steals people’s work and essentially passes it off without crediting the creators. In fact, many AI models are trained by taking information from the internet––information that comes from real people and their research and creativity. According to The Atlantic, thousands of screenwriters’ scripts have been used to train AI systems for many major companies via their subtitles, without consent or compensation. This has also been the case with several authors who found out someone had used AI under their name to make a profit, as well as OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) allegedly pirating books online to train its systems without permission.

As a writer myself, I can’t stand the idea of these companies taking advantage of real creatives for their own soulless gain. We put our blood, sweat, and tears into our words and worlds, and to have some non-human entity pass it off as its own or use it for companies’ financial gain makes me furious. When I put that music prompt above into ChatGPT and saw what it came out with, I was immensely scared––despite the low quality, it had done what I had asked it. It had written a poem in under a second that might take a real person a long time to do. As this technology improves and further continues to insert itself into nearly every aspect of our lives, soon it could be nearly impossible to tell the difference. The next book we read might be written entirely by AI, or worse, written using real authors’ words.

Let me be clear: I am not 100% against everything AI. If I were, how would I even be able to adjust to our rapidly evolving––some might argue devolving––society? I used Grammarly to help proofread this very article, and I don’t consider myself unethical for doing so. It’s a tool that helps with the little things that would otherwise take up time I could be using to actually write. It isn’t doing the thinking for me; it’s cleaning up the thinking I’m doing on my own. Some may not even be comfortable using this kind of program, and that’s completely okay. The one thing I’ll say, however, is that AI isn’t going away anytime soon. We shouldn’t hide from it but rather educate ourselves and seek to protect the one thing that keeps society from completely falling apart: the artists.

With the exception of the music poem, this article was not written by AI. And I can promise you: Nothing I “create” ever will be.