Should writers use AI?

AI (artificial intelligence) is everywhere these days. Every organisation seems to offer a tailor-made AI agent for us to ‘communicate’ with. When you look something up on Google (and other search engines), the first thing to come up is the AI overview. Like it or not, AI has changed how information is gathered and displayed.

Many people are now required to use AI at work to automate tasks and make their jobs more efficient.

What about writing with AI?

I don’t use AI to write articles on Purplexed Science for reasons I will get into below. However, even WordPress has an ‘AI Assistant’ that I use to organise links at the end of each post. Seriously, it’s everywhere!

There is currently a lot of controversy in the writing community regarding AI. Initially, I was vehemently against AI. And then one day Copilot opened on my laptop, and…I didn’t hate it. In fairness, the use of AI was spearheaded by search engines spitting out bad results. Whether that was deliberate is not for me to say. All I know is that Google was spitting out some strange things (and I don’t see that anymore).

Back to writing, and some are all for it. Some people put their ideas into their LLM (large language model) of choice and consider that to be their work. Other writers use it for editing, planning and tweaking things. Some consider it a poisoned chalice. I have noticed more places becoming more accepting of AI, though. Most likely because they’re using it themselves. You can find many AI generators online. I found one just now called Story.com. I browsed through its selection and found this: The Villain’s Desire.

It seems to be Marvel fanfiction, and it’s interesting (and very repetitive). This probably wouldn’t fool anyone.

This one could: A short story written entirely by AI (it’s also quite repetitive).

And that’s the issue with AI. It’s not about usage but ethics. Writers passing AI-generated text as theirs is unethical. If you make a living by/from writing, it would be easy to get frustrated by these people who have no qualms about feeding an LLM a prompt and polishing words they didn’t write.

I know because I am that writer. Years ago, I grew dismayed at AI and how people were using it to churn out books and throw them on Kindle or their book platform of choice. There I was, struggling to hit 80,000 words of my novel, and people were creating books from scratch in days! I swore I’d never do it. And I haven’t. Eventually, I picked up my story again, and I am having fun working on it.

The funny thing is whenever I had writer’s block, I would joke about having a tool that would take the words from my brain and put them down. I never wanted that tool to rearrange everything for me. Nothing compares to sitting down and filling a blank page. Typing into a box isn’t the same. Everyone has a unique tone and writing style because we are all different, and over-reliance on AI takes away from that.

I’ve pasted various text into AI, and…sure, it looks fancy. It doesn’t sound like me, though. I like my (at times clumsy but generally good) prose that sounds like me. I want to be able to read what I wrote and instantly connect with it.

So, when should you use AI?

There are some uses that I’m all for – those annoying emails you don’t want to send. Responding to a parking ticket. Things that you would need a template for. AI is also helpful for people with accessibility or learning issues. I support them using AI to communicate better.

Using AI to edit and enhance your text is also useful – but proceed with caution. AI is often wrong. If people continue to rely on AI, will they be able to spot these mistakes? Will people take the time to learn grammar and structure? Or will these mistakes become accepted as we go along?

Time will tell.

Oh, and one more thing – I was using em dashes way before AI!