Writing has and always will be a human skill, I don’t care how much you love ChatGPT or AI. It’s irrefutable. Writing, art and creativity stem solely from the human mind. And for you AI bros who argue “But AI will understand and feel everything you feel soon” – that’s not how human experience works and if you think it is then you must lead a sad, hollow life. Sorry.
But in all seriousness, writing comes from somewhere, usually nuanced experiences – and these experiences manifest in different ways. There’s just no way AI can ever experience that. When it comes to writing style, the use of particular vocabulary, metaphors etc. That all comes from experience.
AI writing in its current state feels like a half-baked regurgitation of a Wiki article. There’s a strange mix of formal and informal dialogue that together just sounds peculiar tonally. Almost like ChatGPT is trying to “be human” which I guess it is but in reality nobody writes the way AI writes.
To put AI to the test we used ChatGPT for a handful of articles last week and although OpenAIs software did help us to pump out content with next to no effort, the results were pretty stiff and devoid of any kind of internal thought or feeling.
Why did I do this you ask? To annoy people of course… no just kidding, but let’s be honest, AI is a hot topic right now. In a bid to be controversial, I wanted to publish a number of articles using AI to see if 1. Anybody noticed and 2. If it really is “faster” or easier to just ditch a human and use Ai.
But AI writing reads as you’d expect- ChatGPT tries to throw in some “modern” terminology or dare I say “human” dialogue but it just sounds corny and quite honestly I think most 14-16-year-old creative writing students could write something far more engaging. In fact, most could write a lot better than me but then I’m not really a writer and neither is ChatGPT.
What scares me is how many brands right now are using AI to write, to produce art, advertising, who knows what. All in an attempt to save time. But what these people are failing to realise is that they’re also losing their authentic voices as brands. And people see right through it.
For the simple task of “getting it done” ChatGPT is a dream. But it also comes off like you couldn’t give a shit about your content or your audience. It really is the laziest way to put stuff out there.
I also found myself having to correct a lot of the articles, they were often factually wrong or the words used were just too unnatural. If I’d have written the article myself I’d have probably spent less time on it.
So after all that, I learned a few things. Firstly, ChatGPT’s writing sounds monotonous and totally devoid of feeling or a personal voice. Secondly, you may end up spending more time editing the content to sound “right” which begs the question, why not just write it yourself? And finally, it just sucks.
If you’re a creative writer I don’t think you have to be worried about losing your job anytime soon.
