AI is here to stay. It’s a great tool for a variety of tasks. I use it daily. In terms of writing, It’s great pair of mechanical eyes to scan for errors and even point out style guide mistakes.
I also use it for research. Recently, I was working on my sci-fi yarn and asked it questions about the physics of atmospheric entry. I enjoyed the process. I was able to direct questions on how atmosphere and speed affects a fast moving object. I was able to use that knowledge to rewrite that part of the story.
Now some folks have decided to use AI not as a content augment tool but instead use it as the content itself. This is a bad idea. AI may write seemingly passable content, but it is not an effective writer. At the moment, this is just not possible.
Effective writing
I recently chatted with a copywriter. His job was to take copy written by Indian writers, and “punch it up” for American audiences. He said it was a rough assignment because most of the submitted material was AI generated.
I have not tried to coax effective writing from an LLM. My guess is that it requires lots of “guardrails” in the prompt. That is, the prompt should provide explicit directions on voice, style, and audience. It also requires a lot of constraints on content as well. After all that, you’re still going to spend time editing it to fit your vision.
That’s a lot of work! I get it. Writing is hard. Kurt Vonnegut said it best where he said, “when I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in my mouth”. With AI, you are removing Vonnegut’s crayon.
The issue with AI generated text is that it is algorithmic in nature. It tries to provide a meaningful response to a prompt based on statistics and probability. It has no understanding of the person asking the question nor what the person intends to do with the writing.
Effective writing is just the opposite. Effective writing is writing for a specific audience. This writing intimately understands its audience’s needs and the wants. Effective writing doesn’t waste the audience’s time. Each word, sentence and paragraph is calculated to maximum effect.
An effective writer also adapts with their audience. An audience is not static. It’s a living organism that shifts over time. It grows and shrinks. It changes based on events. The best writers are able to communicate with their audience not where they are, but where they will be. The true auteurs take their audience wherever they go.
AI writing can’t do this because it is static. That is, it is based on massive static models. Once these models are published, they are already out of date. They are a snapshot of the past. Most importantly, these models have no understanding of an audience of where they are and where they are going.
To better understand this concept, take a gander over to LV426. Just don’t stay too long as it seems to be experiencing a “bug” problem.
In space, no one can hear your fan-rage
I am a huge fan of the Alien franchise. I’ve watched all the movies, read a great deal of books, and played many video game adaptions. I’m also an active member LV426 – an Alien fangroup over on Reddit.
It’s a relatively small fandom compared to something like Star Wars or Harry Potter. It’s easy to see it as cohesive, but it is anything but. Most people love Alien and Aliens. A lot of folks don’t like Alien 3, but there is a very vocal contingent who think of it as the best movie in the series. On top of this, there is Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. These are two incredible divisive movies in the fandom. It retcons some key aspects of the series and has split the fandom down the middle.
When writing an article on the franchise, you’d need to consider all of this, but also through the filter of the recently released Alien: Romulus. If you were sharing your article on LV426, you need to get your facts right. There is no room for error. Should you shift your audience to a general entertainment site like Polygon, you may have some latitude.
Knowing the audience also means including jargon and terminology that may be obtuse to outsiders. In the Alien franchise, you may see terms like “stay frosty”, “bug hunt”, and “game over.” These all speak to the fandom. The subreddit name LV426 refers to a planet in the Alien universe. Heck, even this section title was a reference to famous Alien slogan, “in space, no one can hear you scream.”
The danger in getting it wrong means losing your audience. This happens to plenty of writers out there even when they know what they are doing. It’s hard to experience. The difference with an AI is that the AI has no concerns about the outcomes. There is no sense of responsibility. The person who accepts the blame is the person who posted the content. Use at your own peril.
The road ahead
It’s impossible to say where our new AI future leads. There may be a time when machines can express as well as humans. Maybe people will carry around their own LLM virtual pets much like kids did in the 1990s. Or maybe there will be an outright rejection of it. I don’t know.
I do know that the whole of human creation is a shared connected experience. Abdicating personal expression to machines is abdicating the purpose of being alive. I can only wish people use AI as a tool to elevate their own voice as opposed to replacing it.
I do have hope. Humans have a wonderful way of adapting to the trials of the natural world and to the trials of their own making. First there is fear, then understanding, and finally, there is art.
