Since Chat GPT debuted a year ago, discourse about AI in the writing world has only increased. Where do you stand on the issue?

AI is an amazing feat of engineering, so revolutionary that it’s already changing the world. But, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Already, there’s been a sharp spike in AI-assisted scamming traps, and some have even used AI to steal authors’ audiences. I hope we can all agree that these consequences are terrible. But what about the not-so-nefarious issue of AI-written content?

If you’ve ever posted an AI-generated story or article before, I’m not here to judge you. Really. With all the content I put out on a weekly basis, I’ve been tempted to hand some of the work off to Chat GPT myself. Writing is hard, and many times, it’s a relief to take any shortcut available. But as I’ve learned more about AI, specifically as it relates to writing, I’ve discovered that Chat GPT isn’t really a shortcut—and you might want to think twice before churning out those robot-written articles. If you’re on the other end of the spectrum, despairing at the amount of AI-written content nowadays, I want to give you hope.

AI isn’t a shortcut, but it’s not something that should make us give up in hopelessness, either. Human writing is still important, and we can learn to treat AI not as the enemy, but as a tool in our favour. Here’s how (and why)!

Scarcity Increases Value

This is a universal tenant of humanity. Why are diamonds so expensive? Because they’re rare. Why do people sell old collectibles? Because collectors will pay hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars for a rare item. Why do we value the kindness of a stranger? Because too often, we see only hatred and anger.

Here’s the point. As AI becomes more and more integrated into our culture, more and more people are going to use it as the “easy way out.” Another universal tenant of humanity is that everyone wants to go the easiest way. Just in the past year, I’ve seen the amount of AI-written articles skyrocket. (How can I tell which ones are AI-generated? We’ll talk about it in a minute.) This will only get worse with time.

But here’s the bright side: as AI-written content saturates the world, human-written content will become that much more valuable because it will be more difficult to come by. Real readers and writers desire content that relates to them on a human level, and only humans can do that effectively. If you stick it out and keep writing your own words, you’ll grow a dedicated audience that will value your content all the more as AI continues to dig its roots further into our culture.

AI Is an Adaptable Tool

While it’s easy to have AI write entire articles and even books for you, it’s not great quality and you can sniff out the robot from a mile away. To create better quality content while still streamlining the writing process a bit, I’ve found AI to be most useful for ideation, outlining, and headline creation (with a caveat—see the “How to Spot an AI-Written Article” section). This helps me to delegate the more technical tasks to AI while still having complete control over them, and then I can focus more on creativity and post quality!

While some have found success with having AI write an article and then heavily editing/rewriting it, I’ve found that this actually doesn’t save me time. In fact, it often takes more time than writing the article myself. So experiment with AI and see how it most effectively suits you as a tool. If you get it right, it can help streamline your writing process without compromising quality!

Writing Is about Humanity

No matter how much AI develops, it will never truly understand what it means to be human. Our brains are so complex that biologists and scientists don’t even fully understand them yet, and I don’t think they ever will. And do you know one of those human things that’s not entirely explicable by science? Creativity. If we don’t really know how it works, AI certainly can never reproduce true human creativity. It can use formulas to emulate creativity to an extent, but creativity simply can’t be defined by numbers or letters—or anything else, for that matter.

This is why people love stories: they’re human. AI can come up with something similar, but it’s not human, and you can tell. Speaking of that. . .

Bonus: How to Spot an AI-Written Article

I make it a point not to support AI-written articles when I can help it because I want to show people and companies that I value human writing. Here’s how you can quickly spot an AI-written article:

• Headline/title with a colon (such as “The Power of Emotion in Storytelling: A Writer’s Review of Pride and Prejudice” or “The Art of Character Creation: “Lessons from Middle-Earth.”) This isn’t always a telltale sign, though; take the title of this post for example! AI didn’t create it. Still, once you recognise the pattern of these types of headlines in AI-written articles, you can’t unsee it. When I use AI for headline/title generation, I specifically tell it not to use a colon because these titles get real old, real fast
• Outdated or cheesy humour
• A phrase like “let’s dive in” before the article’s main points (again, not always a telltale sign)
• A generic introduction (such as “Many people wonder about _______, so today, we’re going to take a look at how to. . .”)
• Formal vocabulary in casual writing
• A generic but polite tone

Additionally, I think most would agree with me that there’s a distinct quality in AI writing that can’t quite be described with words. After you’ve read human-written content your entire life, it’s easier to tell the difference.

Human-Centred Writing

By now, I hope you understand why human creativity is so important and why you should continue to tap into it over the “quick and easy” AI-written content. AI might seem worrying, it might seem like a cheat code, but as long as we remember what writing is all about, human creativity will always be valuable.

Happy writing!
—E.J.

---

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider buying one of my books, donating to the blog, reading my stories on Vocal, and/or taking a look at my RedBubble shop so I can continue to produce 100% free content!

Photo by Eli Alvarez on Unsplash