Is AI writing any good?
A perspective from LaDonna Witmer, a writer who has been a newspaper reporter, and advertising copywriter, an editorial director, and an after-hours poet. TL;DR: she’s written a lot of un-AI-assisted words.
I used to scoff at the idea of a robot taking my job. When it came to writing, I thought, AI was a glorified spell check. More often than not the predictive text offered up by gmail or iMessage is annoying rather than helpful.?(No one is ever trying to say “ducking,” Siri.)
But in recent months, as entire departments of writers take the hits and turn to careers in?dog walking or HVAC installation?instead of word crafting, I stopped scoffing.
No matter what the actual capabilities of AI writing might be (and that goalpost is constantly moving), there exists a perception that AI is a good enough writer to replace actual humans with training and experience and talent and deep understanding of all the nuances of voice and tone.
What makes writing “good”?
Has anyone ever successfully described “good”? The goalposts change here, too. The bar rises or falls depending on who you talk to and where you work.
Defining “good” to an entire org is the bane of many a designer’s existence. We create style guides and define brand voices and run critiques and then get feedback that the CEO never liked the word “prospective” or the Head of Marketing doesn’t feel comfortable with that shade of green. Non-design folks have a very different definition of “good.”
For many of those folks–the ones who hold the power and the purse strings–AI generated writing looks good, sounds good, feels good too. Good enough to cull the entire herd of content designers, in some cases.
When I (a writer with a journalism degree and 30 years of experience) look at any collection of words with an eye for “good,” I’m looking for some very specific things:
A non-writer can hit numbers 1–4 with some planning, craft, and effort. But #5 is the shine on the moon, the icing on the cake. Number 5 is that you-have-it-or-you-don’t, you-know-it-when-you-see-it, can’t-be-taught-can-only-be-had sort of something.
Depending on your taste in essays, fiction, or literature, the authors who pop into your mind when you think of Really Good Writing may vary. I’ve got a top ten list of fantastic authors who fit the bill, one of whom is Neil Gaiman — he of?The Sandman?and?American Gods?and?Neverwhere?and so many more brilliant books.
Recently, someone tagged him on Twitter to ask what he thought of a few paragraphs Chat GPT had written which misrepresented some of his work.?His response: “ChatGPT doesn’t give you information. It gives you information-shaped sentences.”
Information isn’t creation
In many ways, “artificial intelligence” feels like a massive misnomer. It’s not intelligence, exactly. It’s a compiler. A summarizer. A data-gatherer. And while research is an essential and important part of the writing process, it is not all the craft consists of.
Consider this “poem” written by a bot described as “the most powerful?AI poem generator?available, trained on more than 178 billion parameters:”
Wild geese flying south
Sometimes north
Flying, squawking,
Crying out
Morning, noon, dusk, night
Always there.
So, ok. Is this a description of what geese do? Yes. Is it formatted like a poem? Yes. Is it a poem, though? Oh god, no! It is a poem-shaped thing that has no soul.
Consider instead?Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese–not even the entire poem (please do give yourself the gift of?reading the whole thing?later), but the first five lines:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
领英推荐
THAT is poetry. Those words capture the essence of something distinctly human and distill it in a way that a machine cannot–dare I say will?never–do.
UX writing, brand writing, advertising and marketing writing isn’t (often) poetry. So let’s look at an example a little closer to home. Here’s the beginning of the definition I wrote for the Design Dept. brand voice:
Our voice is the expression of our brand in words. It capitalizes on our root strengths to reflect who we are and what we value. The Design Dept. voice is intentional, inclusive, credible, bold, and designerly.
And then we have Jasper, whose people describe it as: “an?AI copywriting?assistant trained by expert copywriters. He can generate unique content and high-converting copy for marketers, agencies, and entrepreneurs.” This is what Jasper had to say about the Design Dept. voice:
Jasper is… not wrong. But it’s also not right. This description of a brand voice is not specific or unique. It doesn’t provide any kind of real clarity. It’s a nonsense blurb. It’s information-shaped sentences.
An algorithm of assimilation
AI is trained by humans but processes data at a rate humans could never replicate. Jasper, for example, has apparently read “10% of the internet,” and if it had a body would totally be one of those people at a party spouting off random obscure facts at the drinks table.
No matter how much of the internet AI has absorbed, it is merely an algorithm. It’s throwing prompts in a blender and serving up a word salad with a lizard on top.?It is not truly intelligent?and it does not create pieces of writing that mean something real. For that, you need a human.
And you don’t just need any generic human banging out prompts. To wring the most benefit out of AI writing tools, you need a?writer?to wrangle them. To direct it with prompts, yes, but then to take those information-shaped sentences and hunt for the useful bits. You need a writer to weed out the completely falsified or out-of-date facts and ridiculously pompous phrasing. You need a writer to make sense of the nonsense.
I had a whole conversation with Chat GPT the other day, trying to get it to craft me a headline for this very article. This was its first headline effort:
“Unveiling the Writer’s Identity: Is AI a Friend or Foe to the Written Word?”
“That’s a terrible headline,” I replied.
“I apologize if the suggested headline did not meet your expectations. Crafting a headline is subjective, and it can be challenging to capture the desired message in a single line. If you can provide more specific guidelines or preferences for the headline, I’ll be happy to give it another try and come up with an alternative that aligns better with your vision,” the bot texted. (The “subjective” line made me laugh out loud.)
Its next several attempts, though, were just as cringe — an entire bucket full of groaners. I described them to a friend as the efforts of “a 16-year-old trying to show off in English class”:
At this point, if Chat GPT were a real copywriter I’d hired, I’d un-hire them immediately.
I tried several more prompts, asking for less formal and more conversational (“Unleashing AI on the Writing World: Friend or Faux?” was the response). I asked for less aggressive and confrontational options and got “AI and Human Writers: A Harmonious Dance of Creativity.” I tried a few more asks and then finally texted: “You are truly horrible at this!”
The bot served up the same boilerplate “headlines can be subjective” defense and we were full circle back at the beginning.
A good place to start
So here’s where I’m at: Let’s stop thinking of AI as a super-smart C3P0-style android who’s going to waltz into companies and replace entire departments of writers. Let’s think of it instead as a tool. A brainstorming hack. A typing assistant. A method of getting a writer unstuck when they’re blocked with a blank page and a blinking cursor and far too little caffeine.
If we think of AI as a tool that can enhance our human craft, instead of a creator in and of itself, then it becomes merely a good place to start. “Generative artificial intelligence,” it’s called, so let’s use it for generation. Let’s use it to jumpstart our own creative process, not replace it.
Mike Sharples, a professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK,?said something similar recently: “You can either take a sort of apocalyptic view of, AI is going to put professional writers out of a job, it’s all doom and gloom and AI is going to take over, or you can take the glass-half-full approach, which is that there are some amazing tools that are coming and as writers we can make good use of them and as teachers, we can make good use of them.”
Say you’re a writer tasked with producing five corporate blog posts a week. Now you can use the new?Jetpack AI Assistant?to whip up a post that’s chock full of SEO clickbait for the keyword trawlers. But you’re not done yet, because this AI assistant is just that: an assistant. Your involvement is still required to fact check and wordsmith and build on top of what the tool has provided you. Otherwise you might get 500 words that mean absolutely nothing.
Even Chat GPT knows this. “Remember, this is just a starting point,” the bot will tell you, “crafting a brand voice takes time and effort.”
So back to my earlier failed bot headlines. I tried again, revised my prompts, chose my words carefully, and got something a bit different. Something like:
“Exploring the Boundaries of Artificial Intelligence in Writing”
or “Harnessing AI Writing Tools for Creative Inspiration and Productivity”
These headlines still were not what I’d call “good,” but they were a little less terrible.
I had wanted to use an AI-generated headline for this piece, or one that I co-wrote with AI, but my bar for “good” is higher than the bots can reach right now. Who knows, maybe in six months Jasper will have read 20% of the internet and might have a few more zingers for me. Until then, I’m not quaking in my boots.