|
Enjoy
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
This article was not written by AI. There can be little denial that humanity have entered a new era, the age of Artificial Intelligence. This has long been the dream of humanity, the next stage where we lay down our tools and minds and give up some of our autonomy to servicing robots. Humanity’s information overabundance has now reached true automation. As every industry and sector pours their resources into AI integration, it has been the release of AI chatbots that has taken society by storm. Messenger bots like ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot and Gemini now offer instant answers to all our questions, from problem solving to researching and analysis. One topic that has not been discussed enough, however, has been the surge of AI chatbots as ‘writing companions’. AI writing has flooded every computer screen and submitted essay. Words are no longer being merely spell-checked but wholly amended for ‘better’ structure and grammar. With these ‘perfect’ AI written work, we ought to ask: will the cause for human writing remain strong and distinguishable in the exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence? One may argue this was everything we wanted – writing done in seconds to leave the human mind restful for all other things. Ultimately, this article will examine the dimensions to our increasing trust of AI writing. I will highlight the many uses AI seeks to serve as an undeniable, powerful tool to automation and learning. I then seek to raise caution to the overreliance of AI towards writing. Even in our most imperfect forms, writing reflects a human attitude, a response to our environment and a never-ending source of originality from our indecipherable realities.
1. Artificial Intelligence Today:
Artificial Intelligence has long been in the making. Just picture your typical utopia, most often it involves robots and computer systems doing all our chores at our command, enabling society as a whole to sit back and enjoy a luxury automated future. Many of us would be surprised to reflect on our present times and realise many of the depictions are closer to reality than thought in long-lost stories and artwork. We now have countless ‘smart’ devices, from lights, thermostats, sensors, doorbells, vacuum cleaners, to phones and watches that can record our heartbeat, sleep and exercise.
However, if this did not satisfy the glorious dreams of a tech future enough, the moment is rapidly changing to a greater, truer automated utopia or for others a dystopia. Artificial Intelligence is officially here. For those who may have been living in distant cave, computing has now reached a new unprecedented level. A body of algorithms that takes away the effort of human thinking. We are of course talking about AI chatbots which appears to have been the master project of decades of computing and information gathering. These chatbots have rolled out into every space. Whether it’s ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini, Jasper and many more, they have suddenly popped up in many different forms, all taking on the heavy task of thinking and responding to our countless questions. The idea of chatbots have long been around, as we find in movies and TV shows the depiction of terminals secretly giving us answers beyond common knowledge. On the other hand, today’s AI proves different. This is not just another phase of more haphazard ‘digital assistants’ like Siri and Cortona. Rather, it is far beyond it, with no one being able to deny these Chatbots genuinely work and are proving functional. It is in this latter point that is sending shockwaves through every industry. AI today is seriously good and it is only going to go further – the algorithms driving its responses mean it continues to get more knowledgeable, more capable of doing our thinking and processing of the world.
To really express the power of AI today, it proves helpful to go beyond the computing jargon and see the results of ourselves. AI has swashed into every sector showing only few limits to its ability to interpret and decide. In its responses, it writes sentences, paragraphs. And not just any, as within seconds it holds the power to scour the internet and piece together intelligent responses alongside knowing every method to writing; it writes guides, letters, reports, articles and essays exactly as you want in a meticulous computerised fashion. You want a speech that includes 2 syllable words every 5 words that’s less than 500 words? It will exactly do that, taking instruction in and using its limitless nodes to pull together mind-boggling responses within seconds.
There is one aspect, however, that appears to be silent from today’s discussion: Have AI chatbots become better than us humans at writing? There is no doubt, these chatbots have gained the speed on us. Where we have pain ourselves to constructing meaningful and grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs, AI does it in a blip from the information it gathers. More impressively, on the surface it could be left to do its own research to construct written pieces with seemingly more knowledge than a writer like myself. It sure has proven easy for university students to get it do their coursework. It can be delegated to think and process information on more levels than a student could gain studying the entire evening or even week. As shown, AI also equally demonstrates creative flair.
It would seem a struggling writer, slugging through ideas about character development and imagery could have their work cut out by an AI chatbot who does it all in a few seconds. Many would admit AI for this comparison like in many tasks has become a demotivating factor to try harder. Why bother as increasingly more say: “I’ll give it to ChatGPT to write it out for me and I’ll edit it after”. Our turn to AI chatbots has become the new layer of Googling, now allowing AI to both search and give us what we want completed. With the end result being so easily accessible now, the mind is left to deeply wonder if the activity of human writing is now like the accountant who question if there’s any need for mental mathematics with a calculator at their fingertips.
Subsequently, purpose in writing proves to be an extremely important dimension to our use of AI writing. It would appear the requirements of writing all around us, from needing letters, to job application answers, to essays and hourly new articles have desensitised ourselves to the real identity and voice behind writing. It’s not surprising to see AI scoop up writing as discourse, in all its conventions, norms and expectations, and provide almost standardised responses (with modified elements) to specific requests. It may not sound so impressive now but this serves as a relevant point that we must be increasingly aware that there is far more meaning, purpose and connection to be found in writing than losing all our senses to AI chatbots.
2. AI Writing vs Human Writing:
A. Writing with emotion: The Human Soul
It can be argued that the written pieces from the request of AI will never overcome the rich, authentic art of human writing by its very expression needing a soul to begin with. An AI chatbot may well produce long written essays from vast amounts of information. The thing it cannot do, however, is write with a weight of meaning. By its very design, as a language learning model, with its vast complexities of algorithms, it relies on hard information. Cold, senseless data in which a computer must ‘learn’ to apply emotion, meaning and context from its input. This may strike at the very heart of the argument concerning the possibility of a singularity, a point where robots grow capable of replacing human bodies. For the AI bot, the task of spitting out text holds no existential significance. From one request to another, it moves on as a soulless robot would, forever interpreting and manipulating information.
Writing from the human being differs because we live through our written expressions. The sentence could be a matter of three words, or be written by a child with a series of spelling mistakes. The difference, nonetheless, presents itself in the sentences being many branches to a person’s thoughts, emotions, world-view, circumstance and beliefs. One may argue, of course, a senseless gossip column describing a recent celebrity break up holds no writing value – something an AI chatbot could soullessly produce without sapping our own conscience. This argument, however, proves unhelpful in addressing the prevailing question. If we are to assess AI’s potential to replace humans in writing, we must focus on the service to fellow human beings through personalised texts, i.e. through created letters, diaries, journals, essays, stories etc.
As phenomenal as AI writing appears today, increasingly blurring the lines between generated and original content, storytelling will always in essence belong to the human being. Whereas a computer program will forever interpret, analyse and manipulate data, we hold the most powerful element in creating. The writer cultivates life through their sentences, as such carrying a purpose. We do not simply write but bleed emotions through our work. Even where we aim to write professionally, the source of our words and content derive from the elements of the world which spark thoughts in our lives. The transferring of autonomy to the AI robot still does not have the heart to reflect the syntaxes that reach from the mind to the page. The AI robot will retrieve, refine and output from outside of itself forever as long as it holds no capacity feel, touch, see and feel impacted by the world. Its output comes through numbers and letters without the potential to be profound different. The thing is with writing, we writers can forever be original, to develop words from our very human nature. It is what has carried civilization to not merely wait but express in its wildest dreams the infinite possibilities of life. Storytelling, Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Theology and all else has to this day been possible through conscientious human thought. Without the deep intuitions for the outside world, writing ceases to be little more than vacuous words scattered on a page to be blown away by the future.
B. Writing with purpose: existence vs servitude
In a similar point, we must ask ourselves what purpose does AI fulfil in our writing needs? As the current use stands, many of us are using AI chatbots for most mundane writing tasks. It may even be for a school essay, what matters is that when we delegate to AI, it is usually a choice where we have declared a piece to not hold enough value to warrant our full creative energy and painstaking thoughts. Afterall, writing – creative or not, requires demanding thought.
There can be little denial the array of AI chatbots today can write informative pieces at an extraordinary level. With its all-encompassing grasp of the internet, it only takes it seconds to scour through the internet and produce information rich content without any physical effort. It is no wonder AI chatbots have become the next craze for every student – why bother when technology is here to save us precious time and energy.
The effort we put into our human written pieces, however, has never been so much about function but far more about the discovery of meaning in our time and space. The art of writing is always a deep reflection of our existence. As touched upon earlier, the words we put unto paper refract real emotions and attitudes according to circumstances in our lives. Writing in most forms become what many would regard as an exercise to questioning our subjective thoughts and feelings. As we write, every sentence helps us think, re-think and discover. Delegating to a AI chatbot removes us from this crucial exercise of contemplating. Suddenly, we lose the key component in our lives which is writing as an activity to lay out the details from mind to environment and consolidate such information into the substructures of our brain. It is through writing we establish pathways to look beyond, creating tributaries of thoughts that keep us exploring.
Writing in the moment helps us to clarify our ideas. A piece cannot be left with just a word or sentence. The page demands us to explain ourselves with whatever we work on. As we put more puts on screen or paper, the self grows aware to a writing journey involving a perpetual battle between truths and falsehoods. Every sentence written, every description given forces the writer to pause, contemplating their reality with the things that may or may not be possible, for better or for worse. Hence, uncovering truths and deconstructing falsehoods form essential exercises within writing no AI could offer. A chatbot may correct us or provide us private therapy sessions in the future. But without the ability to feel or look like a human, we humans ourselves will depend on writing as not just a function but a purpose to contemplating our profoundly complicated realities. Therefore, in the comparison between AI writing and human writing, the latter reflects an experience far more important to our existence. The journey of writing gives us a means to reflect on our beliefs and ‘findings’ and follow with impassioned action.
C. Writing with imperfection
Another reason why human writing remains fundamental to our existence in the backdrop of AI is the prevailing difference between in the two writing styles. This something more difficult to explain or describe but nevertheless a stronger indication to the deeply intuitive side to written stories, articles, essays etc. When viewing AI written pieces, there remains a cold, distant nature and for many reasons.
For a start, an AI written piece appears too perfect. Immediately, there will be shouts about how this could possibly be a bad thing. Writing to be respected needs correctly spelling, grammar and structure. However, it seems very few have contemplated that human writing comes in many shapes and sizes. Apart from writing styles fitting the correct context, our writing in many instances possesses an evolutionary character. Human writing in its all forms with its perspectives, attitudes and notions has meant many writing pieces become more than just one piece. Think about the essays written by great philosophers, books by economists, journal articles about the human body and mind, stories about utopias and dystopias – these have all stretched beyond their own subject areas. It can be argued this has derived from the very spontaneity of human thought and writing. Without being so perfected in function or purpose, the written pieces have been able to breath, possessing profoundly unique discussions and ideas. On the other hand, AI writing saps this spontaneity/potential to become. It hones into its given task with literal precision where just like a computer program, AI will only ever do what it is precisely told. In contrast, the best metaphors or similes, and other language techniques i.e. repetitions, rhymes, hyperbole, presents itself in authentic form, through shared human perceptions. Thus, AI writing unlike a human written text shows itself in not being able to do the impossible. It may just be a paragraph, or a new sentence, this is all it takes for a piece to transform and show a unique deeply human sentiment unbeknownst to the bot.
Secondly, AI written pieces in its current form appear too bloated and sanitised. In its tied issue of being perfect, the bot takes an overly safe path to writing. Often you find cliché ideas, super sensible sentence structures, vague words and distant summaries that all make a reader frankly bored within a few seconds. In other words, AI writing more often reads like an emotionless encyclopaedia than a conscious human fighting to inject purpose and meaning to their carefully crafted pieces. This all helps to remind us these AI chatbots are not original thinkers. The way they have been built means they work to collect and interpret all the data produced by humans. As such, they will only be a reflection of mass information or their coded designer, rather than a self-challenging, self-reflecting writer as found amongst us humans.
Try guess which is AI and which is the real one!*
| Story 1 | Story 2 |
| The Chime ruled everything. At 6:00 a.m., its tone echoed across the city, signaling the start of a grueling twenty-hour cycle. For Lina, a compliance officer, the System’s rigid demands were life itself. Her visor listed the day’s tasks: “Production monitoring. Nutrient calibration. Dissent tracking.” When Lina encountered a boy holding a forbidden note, everything changed. The scrap of paper read, “There was a time before the Chime.” Fear gripped her as the System alerted her to the infraction. Would she report the boy—or risk everything to protect a truth she barely remembered? | In 2081, true equality had been achieved at a cost. The government mandated handicaps to ensure no one outperformed others: ear devices disrupted intelligent thoughts, weights burdened the strong, and masks concealed beauty. Fourteen-year-old Harrison Bergeron, a towering figure of defiance, tore off his handicaps on live TV, declaring himself free. For a fleeting moment, he inspired rebellion. But his bold stand ended swiftly and violently, leaving the nation in silence, once again shackled by the oppressive ideals of equality. |
The sense of original emotion behind our writing moves unto a grander problem with giving into AI writing, a world of standardised artificial language. Holding all the information of the world, AI writing bots have no issues putting us to shame in outputting written sentences and ideas at a level we swear we could never achieve or take pointless hours, days to produce. With AI being such a powerful time tool, however, it proves more useful moving the perspective away from AI vs Humans. There is no denial Artificial Intelligence has a reached a point of no-return. The super intelligent learning models have progressed to a stage, AI is making decisions in every sector. Rather stop what has been an unstoppable useful machine, we ought to simultaneously cherish more of what makes us human. This includes writing, thought, written and developed by our consciousness – not given to a AI bot to rewrite us a more perfect sentence. Of course, there are always ways to improve our writing, from sentences to paragraphs that can be restructured or rephrased to sound clearer. The looming concern, however, arises where tools like Grammarly are morphing into the writer itself. Increasingly, we see it not such correcting spellings but now planning and even rewriting paragraphs. It may objectively score us the points but the writing moulds into something no longer belonging to ourselves. A piece throw to the machine to chew and spit out, neat and perfect like all the written pieces millions of other people have received in their writing packages. The question then becomes, whose writing are we talking about? A future where students and writers alike give in to AI bots to do all their writing create a picture much like a totalitarian ominous dystopia. A central controller that helps us ‘rethink’ and write out an objectified ‘truth’ to perfect writing. Even if AI chatbots may be considered only a reflection of what we humans put in, the artificial core remains in so far as us delegating our thoughts and decision making to an external force.
Do we want to have writing that is so perfect? The problem with AI is that it’s robotic nature, holding access to all the information of the world and an absolute working code, is its writing loses the sense of being. This is not to say we ought to dismiss grammatical mistakes or writing improvements. Rather, much like the Grammarly app, it is clear to see a world driven into ‘pure’, sanitized writing than sentences that experiment, explore and challenge. Let’s face it there is no perfect writing. Why then should be keep refining, chopping and changing, when much of first written thoughts are a deep reflection of our authentic selves? Hence, AI should not be the tool to police our language. The threat of AI exists in which the future of online writing submerges into a single standardized form. Little did we think the path of singularity would also mean erasing our profoundly unique languages, shaped by dialects, analogies, metaphors, phrases no system of computing could keep up with. In these writing features contains to the robot errors or discrepancies whilst to us they hold a more authentic means of expressing our time and space in limitless new ways. For the AI, as clever as it may be, any attempts to ‘invent’ features of human language would cease to make it anything of relevance.
Conclusion:
In summary, writing in today’s age has been met by the drastic growth of Artificial Intelligence. We are no longer living merely in the internet age but a new era of delegating decision making to AI models. As such, writing as we see it online, across media platforms and perhaps soon in its written form has come to reflect the making of an external body. The plethora of AI Chatbots which have storytelling, applications, reports, letters and more a matter of mere seconds. With immense speed and precision, the floating question on the surface water has suddenly become whether AI writing models have outdone humans in our own writing abilities. However, this article has emphasised writing is more than about function. Despite our obsession for results, writing remains an art-form with distinguishable human elements. No amount of delegating to AI Chatbots could make us for the words, thoughts, ideas and perspectives a page could provide by a living breathing human who takes in the world with a transcendental spirit. The state of existence thus provides infinitely more possibilities in writing, in myriad twists and turns, leaps and jumps, that may appear nonsensical to an objective, emotionless bot but tearful to a visceral living being. Hence, humans retain the means to create, invent and explore to produce originality. In contrast, AI in its model on existing information will only be a reflection of pre-existing writing styles.
Admittedly, pitting Humans and AI models against each other reaches a limit in both directions. For us humans, we can no longer be ignorant to the reality. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. Many of us would still admit to AI doing a better job than we could ever do in researching, teaching or writing. It would be naïve to deny its growing power and convenience to save time in almost part of our life. Nevertheless, the relationship ought to be harmonious but separate. Like our ability to write stories, express opinions and offer advice, so should our lives be oriented in cherishing the human experience. Ultimately for us sentient beings, life exists beyond a computer screen. Our senses enable us to take in the world in infinitely interesting ways to continue the tale of human experiences.
*St0ry 2 was real! From Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
References:
Beckett, A. (2019) ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a manifesto for the future’, The Guardian, 29 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/29/fully-automated-luxury-communism-aaron-bastani-review (Accessed: 07 September 2024).
Czarnecka, L. (2023) ‘Monthly Advancements: Why AI is Making Exponential Progress’, v500 Systems, 20 April. Available at: https://www.v500.com/ai-exponential-monthly-growth/ (Accessed: 26 August 2024).
IBM (n.d.) ‘What is a chatbot?’, IBM. Available at: https://www.ibm.com/topics/chatbots (Accessed: 31 August 2024)
