Artificial intelligence is the No 1. hot-button topic in my world right now. Everywhere I look online, people are discussing AI: how it’s being used, good and bad effects on the environment, students, business, technological leaps, how to tell when it’s being used—so much.
I’ve also had numerous behind-the-scenes conversations about AI with clients and colleagues. If you know me on a personal level, my stance on generative AI is clear, but I wanted to share my thoughts, and why I feel this way.
What I *do* use AI for
Before I get into the negatives, I don’t want it to seem like I’m a complete Luddite, tapping away at a typewriter away from all technology. AI is useful in some capacities, and that is growing all the time. As of right now, I have engaged with AI tools in a couple of ways:
Interview transcription. I use Rev, which transcribes interviews for a monthly fee. This has transformed my ability to produce good articles without hours of hand-typed transcription
Removing objects in Photoshop and Lightroom. Sometimes a good photo of a horse has a dog lying in the arena, or manure in the dirt. This is distracting, and not needed for the photo. It used to take several more steps to remove objects, which took a lot more time. With generative removal tools, it takes a fraction of the time, and looks better than what I could do before. Note: I never change the horse or rider’s appearance for editorial photos, and very rarely do I do it for portraits.
ChatGPT as a thesaurus. Sometimes when I’m stuck on a word, I’ll use ChatGPT to help me think of different word choices. I’ve tried using it to create headlines, but it’s not been useful to me that way.
ChatGPT as a search engine. Occasionally I’ll look for primary sources with a query in ChatGPT. But as I’ll talk about in a minute, I use it as a jumping off point to get to other sources.
ChatGPT for charts. I’ve done this once at an editor’s request, using the magazine’s prompts, to put together results for an event. It was helpful and saved a lot of time, but it’s not part of my typical workflow unless requested.
Why don’t I use AI to write or edit?
I have numerous reasons. Some are personal, and some may apply to you and your business. I welcome your thoughts.
Writing is a skill and it allows you to share your own unique voice. I have spent 20 years as a writer, and I work very hard to continuously hone my skills. I do not want to give away this creative and artistic job to a machine, when it’s something unique that I can offer clients. Even if you’re not a skilled writer, you still have your own writing voice, and sharing that with the world is important.
Human-written content inspires trust. When I’m writing copy for a brand, I’m conveying the brand’s values and developed voice to their audience. There is nuance to that writing, and when a large-language model is used instead, something is lost in the end product. Consumers are becoming fatigued by AI-generated writing, and are learning to mistrust content that appears to be written by AI.
AI can scrape incorrect information. This is my biggest issue with ChatGPT, and Google’s AI summaries. I have used ChatGPT for research, and Google makes summaries without being prompted. What I’ve found is that more often than not, the summary pulled inferences out of thin air, and the sources they used didn’t actually say what the summary said. The answers in the summary range from partially correct to completely wrong. I only know this by digging into the linked sources. As AI is becoming more mainstream, I am worried the future generations will not know how to discern correct information from incorrect, or what is a credible source.
I want to add to content online, not regurgitate what’s already there. My process for writing articles for magazines and creating blog posts for brands is similar. I start with good-quality resources: scholarly journal articles, Extension and university articles written by professors, published non-fiction and reference books—recently I even worked with a translation of Xenonophon’s On Horsemanship. This is in addition to conducting expert source interviews when the post calls for it. This kind of digging takes hours and hours, but I feel it’s important. Sometimes this research pulls up blog posts from other brands. I do not pull from those sources. But when you’re working with a large-language model, they scrape writing from anywhere on the internet. I feel that using this method in my work will only contribute to increasingly poor quality content online, and it’s not guaranteed to be accurate. When we’re talking about horses, conveying accurate and correct advice and information is vital. It can be dangerous to our horses and humans to do otherwise.
AI contributes to less critical thinking. I think about this point for my kids, and students of all ages. The methods I employed to learn and retain information are non-existent for today’s students. Listening, handwriting my own notes, summarizing my own notes to create study guides…this is being replaced with ChatGPT summarizing audio or text. That’s not even counting having AI write essays for you! Educators are wrestling with this issue at all levels now, in addition to trying to teach our future generations. I don’t want to lose those skills in my own work.
I could go on and on, and if you know me, I often do expound on this topic in my personal life. But what I want to convey here is my professional stance on using AI.
I do not use artificial intelligence to craft written work at any point in my process, from pitches to proofreading the final product. If you hire me to write an article, a blog post, a bio or your website copy, you can trust that the words came straight from my brain, not ChatGPT. This may mean paying more for work than you would using a large language model, but I firmly believe that the content I create adds value to your brand, and it respects the time of your reader / customer.
What are your thoughts?
How are you navigating AI in your work these days?
How do you feel about AI-written content spreading online?
Pros and cons from your perspective?
