Last week, I completed Google’s course on AI essentials. I’m not a huge fan of Generative AI, I’m just sort of accepting the inevitable. A writer who doesn’t think AI can replace them should learn what it’s about. Know thine enemy.
Just as many people think they’re good writers, many people think that AI will correct all the issues with their writing. As someone who has been told more than once that my writing is good, and that my copy editing is excellent, I know that if you don’t know what you’re doing, AI can introduce more errors and more confusion.
Ideally, we would be using this technology to do other things, and let creatives get on with their work. But we’re not.
I mean, there are people out there who are using this technology for good – and also people using it for evil. (The potential of deep fakes terrifies me).
But through this course I learned that generative AI needs good writers. To get what you want out of AI, you need to prompt it, evaluate its response, and write a new prompt to dig deeper and really get what you want. That AI doesn’t work without a real human interacting with it.
And at the end of this course, I still didn’t believe that AI is going to eliminate the need for good writers or editors, because nuance will usually escape it, and because AI has a habit of just making things up. They call this ‘hallucination.’ Essentially, you prompt the AI for something it doesn’t know or can’t know because it hasn’t been trained on the right information, so it lies to you.
The issues arise when the person communicating with the AI model doesn’t ask more questions or do more research. Which many people using AI to complete their writing don’t want to do – that’s why they’re using AI.
I think that’s the key for me too: People using AI to write, don’t want to have to write things themselves. I love writing things. I love the craft, I love reading through someone else’s writing, asking questions and making suggestions. If you’re using AI to write and edit, without any human intervention, you’re missing out on possibility.
