There’s a lot of anti-AI screaming from writers these days. It’s so loud and intense that it’s basically scared all the AI-positive and AI-curious writers into hidden groups, too afraid to speak up publicly.
Well, to hell with that. I’m tired of the fear-mongers speaking for us.
When I first encountered ChatGPT, I was intrigued, but quickly disappointed. It didn’t seem like it could do much of interest. And then, when I started seeing tons of its output online, I was annoyed by having to sift through so much gibberish. It was unpleasant, so…
I get having a knee-jerk reaction against LLMs, but if you’re a person who really wants to interact with the world for what it is, if you care about reality & intellectual honesty, then you need to do better than clinging to a knee-jerk reaction.
You need to be willing to learn.
Right now, the anti-AI screaming among writers is making it impossible for them to learn.
Are there ethical issues around AI? Sure.
But it’s not simple. You can’t just call it “plagiarism” and “theft” and call it a day. We need to interact in a more nuanced way.
Most of the writers I see who aren’t part of hidden AI writing groups clearly have no idea what actually goes on in those groups.
AI can be used in so many different ways to help with writing, but when it comes down to it, that’s what it does:
It helps. Writers still write.
The line between a piece of art created by an AI and a piece created by a human — whether written or visual — is already blurry, and it’s just going to get blurrier.
That’s okay. Humans are still the ones with the vision. AIs just help us realize our vision.
Personally, when I’ve played around with using an AI writing assistant (Claude seems best to me), it mostly just feels like having a really attentive beta reader who’s always willing to brainstorm and talk over problems with me. This is an incredible tool.
I’ve tried asking Claude to write actual paragraphs for me, but what I’ve found is that usually those paragraphs — while surprisingly good for being generated by a computer! — mostly just inspire me to say, “No, no, that’s not right; it should be like this,” and write it myself.
Sure, there are people who use Claude or ChatGPT to generate paragraphs, and then actually use those paragraphs. But usually, they edit the paragraphs to suit their needs better. Even if not, the paragraph wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a person behind it trying to communicate.
You can be mad about this all you want. But what I see when I look at the hidden groups of writers working together to figure out how to use AI to help them write is a whole lot of humans, with vision, trying to communicate their vision, and finding AI to be an effective tool.
I want humans to be able to communicate the ideas that are inside of them. And AI genuinely helps some people be able to do that who were struggling before. That is incredibly cool.
There’s a whole spectrum of what it means to use AI to help with writing. It’s not simple.