Can AI Replace Writers?

Back when chat GPT was very new, I was so excited to use it for my writing. Will I be able to save hours and hours writing articles? Will I be able to hire way fewer writers? I used quite a few AI writing tools. But every time the result was the same stark reality.

(BTW if you prefer this in video format, I have made a video of the same thing):

AI writing was just bad.

I was afraid that others at our magazine would keep publishing badly-written AI-generated content. So I published a poll on our Instagram asking our readers, "If you knew an article was written by AI, would you still want to read it?" 100% of people replied "No."

And yet, season after season, I keep receiving applications from journalists and student writers with AI generated articles. I can somehow tell because I've been running a media company for over a decade now. Some people even defend themselves, saying that they only submitted these because AI sounded like them. How can I tell them that, no, it doesn't sound like you. In fact, it can't.

And now, it seems, everyone can tell. I've been seeing so many posts on social media pointing the common signs, like the double dashes, the emojis, evenly-structured sentences, and those generic words. But that's not the point.

Even if you removed all these telltale signs, you could still somehow tell. The main point remains:

If nobody wants to read AI generated content, why does everyone want to publish it?

Maybe, because writing is hard, It's already difficult to think of original ideas, and even more difficult to articulate them. Some people even tell me that they give their points to ChatGPT to convert it into an article, and I don't know if that's better or worse.

So why do people think that AI writes better than them?

Well, AI writing is actually concise and cohesive. The sentences are well-structured and look good, without actually saying anything. Imagine a conversation that stuck with you in a novel you read or a movie you watched. It's probably because the character said something new - an original thought - or added a new perspective.

What we communicate comes from the way we understand things, which is based on our unique experiences. This is why the writing that we enjoy most is interesting, not just well written. This brings us to the question:

Why do we actually read?

To answer this, go back in time and think about this - did you ever want to secretly read your sister's diary or your best friend's letter to her crush?

We want to read because of our basic human need of belongingness, our need to fit in. We have an intrinsic curiosity to understand how other people feel, and to understand their experiences.

This is why we read blogs and magazines and the news, because we want to get that element of surprise. "They did what, you can still do that, or how did they do this? A thought we haven't thought of before.

Since AI doesn't have experiences - because it hasn't lived a life - it can't feel. And therefore, its writing cannot appeal to us. In fact, its writing is not really writing. It's simply a chunk of words that it's generating, which will most likely follow your prompt.

Most likely meaning most average, and by definition they don't have that element of surprise that we are looking for in a news article or a magazine article or in a blog post. In fact, it's that same element of surprise we look for even when we scroll through our social media feed, that brought you to this article, and AI doesn't have that because even its imperfections have a perfection to them.

I always tell my writers to write like you're talking to your best friend; because when we talk so freely, the words we use don't matter, the ideas do.

The focus is not on the choice, or even clarity of thought, but on communication of our feelings and our understanding of things.

A lot of people have told me that they enjoyed my writing, but I didn't use any big words or flowery language. And that's because we are always taught since childhood that good writing is all about clarity of thought and cohesion. But good writing is all about humanness, about adding a personality. A person can't help it. They are not a person without it.

Writing is meant to connect, and so AI isn't writing, because its intent is not to connect. In fact, it doesn't have an intent.

So no matter how badly you write, AI can only replace you if you use it to write, because then, it'll replace your personality, your feeling, your understanding of things, and your unique experiences with empty good-looking words.

#AIwriting #ContentQuality #ReaderFeedback #WritingCommunity #Journalism